Book Reviews
The Champagne Ladies
Chicago, summer of 1968: Two young, sexy strangers named Rita and Sandra move to the city from a small rural community.
The Champagne Ladies
229 pp. Gregg Cebrzynski
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At first, no one knows why they choose the solidly conservative Little Village neighborhood as their home. Fifteen-year-old Ben Podlowski doesn’t care; he adopts them as his mentors. His friend, Joey Baloney, is convinced that these two attractive women must be Playboy bunnies. The super-patriotic Ludmilla Kozak, self-appointed guardian of all that is wholesome, believes Rita and Sandra are subversives intent on destroying life in Little Village. Ben’s deeply religious father warns Ben to stay away from them because they’ll lead him to sin. Others view their arrival, coupled with an influx of Mexican immigrants, as a threat to the stability of a traditional Eastern European neighborhood.
Rita and Sandra’s goal is simple: make a difference in people’s lives. They do, but not in the way they expect. And they never think they’ll be involved in a murder that isn’t solved for 10 years. The summer ends with a devastating fire, which incompetent investigators rule an accident. But Ben never abandons his belief that it was deliberately set, and ten years later he enlists Joey Baloney to discover who was behind it.
In the novel one of the main characters, Ben Podlowski, befriends a Mexican family and falls in love with their daughter, which Ben’s deeply religious father views as a sin. Ben has to gather all his courage to finally ask Ines Tampico for a date.
“The Champagne Ladies,” set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the approaching Democratic National Convention, explores the fears of the old and hopes of the young as “the whole world is watching” traditional values disappear. It depicts the anguish when family members are torn apart by their separate beliefs on race, religion and individual freedom.
