Ginny Good is a page-turning memoir in which Gerard Jones paints a fascinating, sad story of San Francisco in the 60’s.

Jones has written an ode to a real-life girl named Ginny Good, claiming he knows of proof that she was the first hippie. “There’s a picture of her in the school paper at San Francisco State,” Jones claims, and the first use of the word “hippie was in the caption to that picture.” On New Years Eve in 1962 Jones and his friend Eliot Felton, a disturbed green beret, meet Good at a jazz club, not knowing the effect that chance meeting will have on their future, individually and together. Good is a child of divorce, a “goddamn icon,” a drunk, a rape victim and someone desperate for love in the turbulent 60’s, which, as Jones explains, was not a good time for anyone, never mind someone with Ginny’s troubles. But Jones and Felton can’t help me drawn to, loving and taking care of Ginny Good for well over a decade. Her presence disturbs their relationships, their minds, their lives but Jones writes of her so affectionately that he obviously considers her worth every last trouble.

The characters go back and forth between being thoroughly unlikable in obnoxious, hippie ways or too sad and abused by life to arouse anything but pity. These weren’t just a bunch of cartoon-ish hippies with flowers in their hair. These were people with pain and love and dreams who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The 60’s were mainly about avoiding responsibility- everyone openly living rent free, raising even more dysfunctional children, and hurting those around them. But Jones’s description of the time, down to the smallest details, is fresh and different from any other 60’s portrait out there. He notes,

...the whole hippie thing was over by 1966… It had nothing to do with the war or civil rights or free speech. All that riding around in flower power busses was the commercialization of the experience… all that was nothing but advertising by people who’d already taken acid to get other people to take acid, and by then the advertising was getting mistaken for what really went on. A few minds got blown on acid. That’s it.

And speaking of acid, the sublime, mystical, breathtaking scene with Ginny in the woods on acid is worth buying this book alone. Although this is Jones’s debut novel, je has a real flair for prose. Lines such as “chalk dust hovered in shafts of early morning sunlight” fill the tale with vivid images. For the writing, for the 60’s, for Jones, and above all for Ginny, this book deserves to be read.