Rookery Blues - Hardcover

Struggling with their isolated lives at the state college in 1969 Rookery, Minnesota, a small group of people--including professor Leland Edwards, unkempt novelist Neil Novotny, and lovely Peggy Benoit--forms a jazz group known as the Icejam Quintet.

Times Book Review praised the characters in Jon Hassler's last novel, Dear James, as"so exquisitely rendered that even a first-time visitor to Staggerford will come to love them as old friends." Now, in Rookery Blues, Hassler once again brings to life an oddball group of Midwesterners, as they brace themselves and each other for the turmoil of the late 1960s on a small college campus.
Rookery, Minnesota, is about as far north as you can go and still be in the United States, and Rookery State College is an academic backwater if ever there was one. The campus is populated by students seeking draft deferments during the height of the Vietnam War and misfit teachers who can't get a job anywhere else. Even so, some of the faculty at Rookery State long for a meeting of the minds, the companionship of soulmates.
And then, one frigid afternoon, the Icejam Quintet is born in the improbable basement apartment of Neil Novotny, an unkempt English instructor and obsessed novelist. With Lela