The Lost World: A Sentimental Journey

Constance (Connie) Pendleton and Connor Martin, who sit across from each other in the sixth grade, don't like it at all when their teacher, thinking it is clever, starts calling them her "two Connies." But the despised label is the spark that melts their wariness of one another and turns them into friends.

In the 1950s-a Lost World to us now-while the rest of America is growing prosperous, Connie and Connor's families are stuck, though not grimly, in a rundown working-class section of a medium-sized industrial city. At first the only thing they share is their embarrassment over the shabby, small apartments in which they live-Connie with her parents and younger sister, Connor with his aunt. But gradually the things they have in common, including a love of the decade's movies and music, bring about mutual admiration.

As they mature into their teens, their relationship grows closer. But will it blossom into romance and love? Throughout the decade they do a little dance of waxing and waning closeness-the steps choreographed by Connie's fickleness and Connor's indecisiveness-until they seem to be moving toward intimacy.

Then, suddenly, mercurial Connie falls in love with Ben, another boy in their high school. That proves to a disaster-only the first, and the smallest, of a series of disasters that explode their world and, in another allusion to the title, seemingly make it lost to them forever.

Unless fate, chance, coincidence, and the passage of time combine to start up the dance again.