In the early 1950’s a thirty-seven-year-old WWII vet becomes the high school music teacher in a small Florida coastal town where he initiates a romantic relationship with a seventeen-year-old student in his choir. Inspired by actual events the story traces their tragic relationship over a nine-year period.
Set in a small coastal town during the 1950’s when the State stood poised on the verge of rapid development that transformed sleepy fishing and citrus villages into developers’ fantasies faster than the community mores and attitudes could keep pace. Home for a class reunion, Dean Collins recounts to his new younger bride the story of Alec Driver, a WWII veteran Ivy League graduate and Connecticut Yankee who arrived fifty years earlier as part of an advance wave of Northeastern and Midwestern migrants that would soon engulf the Florida peninsula.