No Boundaries

Baby Boomers growing up in the 1960s had many landmines to navigate, grooming them for a whole new set of obstacles in the 70s. Suddenly, in 1971, Fort Wayne, Indiana was under a microscope after the school board elected to bus inner-city students to the suburbs for the first time, turning this midwestern city into a proving ground for desegregation in America.

Descendants of slavery, the Jackson family moved from New Orleans to Fort Wayne to escape segregation and seek a better life for their son, Antonio, a trumpet-playing prodigy. Thrust into a hornet's nest, Antonio was forced to adapt quickly, leveraging his charisma and star power as a musician to become a role model for diversity. Meanwhile, Antonio's father was cast into a different hornet's nest. Employed as a service attendant at the Cadillac dealership, Marquis Jackson worked for Ryan O'Connor, a man who had generated a great deal of wealth in the auto industry.

But the 1970s represented a dramatic change in the economic landscape. After an Arab oil embargo, the price of gasoline suddenly tripled, threatening to end the era of gas-guzzling cars produced in Detroit and opening the door for Japanese competition. Making matters worse, the Teamsters were attempting to unionize O'Connor's workforce, staging an unlikely showdown between the O'Connors and Jacksons, complicated further by the friendship forged between Antonio and his classmate, Quinn O'Connor.

While the teenagers successfully navigate their way through the pitfalls of desegregation, they cannot escape the hypocrisy of their parents and the way their lives become entangled. As the Teamsters converge and the auto industry falls deeper into crisis mode, tensions reach a dramatic climax when a high-profile murder serves up a long list of suspects.

A nostalgic time capsule of the early 1970s, this coming-of-age story captures the way baby boomers were tackling diversity and contesting the traditional roles of their elders. A novel about the privileged and their age-old struggle to maintain power, it retraces influential moments from the 70s and how the status quo was under siege.