A Time to Cast Away Stones

Janet Magill’s brother has been shipped off to Vietnam, and Aaron Becker, her childhood sweetheart, might well be next. When Janet’s parents banish her from the Berkeley protests to what they expect will be a safe, idyllic springtime in Paris, she runs headlong into the 1968 May Revolution and falls in love with a secretive Czech dissident. Far from the City of Light, Aaron makes plans to evade the draft and join her, but loses contact as her "safe" year abroad turns into a dangerous coming of age.

In A Time to Cast Away Stones, Elise Frances Miller catapults the late 1960s beyond media stereotypes that have inflamed opinions of the era for decades. This powerful novel tells the story of Janet Magill, a shy, straight-arrow Berkeley freshman with com-pelling reasons to join the antiwar movement. Janet’s brother has been shipped off to Vietnam, and Aaron Becker, her childhood sweetheart, might well be next. When Janet’s parents banish her from Berkeley to what they expect will be a safe, idyllic springtime in Paris, she runs headlong into the 1968 May Revolution and along the way, falls in love with a secretive Czech dissident. The story brings to life the historical “Events of May,” in which over ten million French citizens were involved in the only student-worker-bourgeois alliance and true “revolution” that a Western, capitalist democracy had ever experienced. Far from the distant and haunting City of Light, Aaron makes plans to evade the draft and join her. He follows Janet’s journey through an embattled correspondence, witnesses the wrenching exploration of her capacity for love, respon-sibility and sacrifice, then loses contact as her "safe" year abroad turns into a dangerous coming of age.

Elise Frances Miller was born in Los Angeles CA. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and holds a Master’s degree in Art History from UCLA. Elise's wide-ranging career includes high school and college teacher, arts critic and reviewer, and communications director at San Diego State University and Stanford University. She wrote in the arts for several well‐known publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Art News, The Reader, and San Diego Magazine, for which she wrote a monthly column. In 1998, she and her husband moved from San Diego to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she enjoys the region’s literary opportunities and her memberships in the San Francisco Writers' Workshop and the California Writers Club, San Francisco/Peninsula Branch. 

Two of Elise's short stories have been published in The Sand Hill Review (2007, 2010) for which she served as guest fiction editor in 2008. These were included in the SHR’s tenth anniversary publication, The Best of Sand Hill Review (2012). In addition, a chapter of A Time to Cast Away Stones was selected for inclusion in the 2010 literary journal, Fault Zone, Words from the Edge, and her short story, “Playing with the Rules,” was published in Fault Zone: Stepping Up to the Edge, 2012.