PRAISE FOR I WAS A TEENAGE COMMUNIST

JC Hopkins has written a novel of growing up leftist in 1980s California and it has the vibe, the atmosphere, and the befuddling political difficulty of that period when punk was thriving, you could still find the underground and dream utopian dreams. The bands, the passions, the fascist threat, the political naivete, the weirdness, the freedom, the romantic appetites and entanglements, it's all here.

Cary Tennis- American author and columnist

A window into an American high school, the frontline of today’s culture wars, where the political is personal, and the stakes couldn’t be higher, with some children and young adults paying with their lives. In “I Was a Teenage Communist” Hopkins depicts a crucible of society’s most pressing issues—how to define individual identity along or at odds with a community growing more and more fractured by the day.

Iris Smyles - American author and humorist

Friendship and teenage rebellion has never looked better than in JC Hopkins' vivid prose. I WAS A TEENAGE COMMUNIST is an endearing, funny and touching coming-of-age story set in 1980s Orange County. You want to root for the young revolutionaries, and see them fight for their lives and ideals. The novel brings you right back to the part of yourself that hungers for justice, the spirited and some may say naive part that exists in all of us.

Linh Luu - Vietnamese/American novelist

Within the sphere of an ending marriage and a high school revolution in Southern California, a brief and endearing narrative unfolds of relationships between teenagers stuck in the bardo of puberty. Through the lens of their mistakes, God, communism and love, not only do the high schoolers partake in a crash course of self discovery but so do the people around them.

Laurie Oakley-Coleman - American author

In “I was a Teenage Communist” JC Hopkins gives us the most likable and diverse set of teen misfits since Bill met Ted, the Breakfast Club skipped lunch and the Brat Pack broke up.

Bibee Hansen- American author and poet

No one could miss the parallels between today and the 1980’s of Ronald Reagan, but the past and the present melt into each other entirely in J.C. Hopkins’ I Was a Teenage Communist, in ringing language - clean, bright, funny and fizzing with energy. Hopkins skillfully stakes out new territory somewhere adjacent to The Outsiders, Heathers and Penelope Spheeris’ Suburbia, until the Cypress High campus, with its divisions, antagonisms, and self-defeating intolerance becomes America itself: everyday, everywhere, right where you are now. 

Wesley Stace - English author and songwriter