California time

The vast, fertile expanses of California's Great Central Valley form the setting of this novel by Ernest J. Finney. This is a world where life and time itself are determined by the rhythms of the crops, and where each of the myriad ethnic groups who have settled here has contributed its own skills and traditions to the heady mix of Valley life. Finney's story traces the Valley's history from the late 1920s until the end of World War II through the lives of three families who work neighboring farms along one of the Valley's nameless roads - the Palestinis, Italian immigrants who grow grapes for raisins; the Brazils, Portuguese dairymen; and the Japanese Hamadas, who raise chickens and strawberries. As the families struggle to make their farms prosper against the challenges of nature and a fickle marketplace, their children grow up together, moving from childhood into adolescence, falling in and out of love, then into the uneasy tensions of young adulthood. And if the patterns of the seasons seem unchanging, life itself is not. The Depression brings starving refugees from the Dust Bowl and further incursions from the greedy Land Company; new crops and technologies are introduced; and cultivation spreads in every direction across the flat expanses of the Valley. Then all familiar life ends with the shattering onset of war. The Hamadas are confined to a relocation camp with other Japanese Americans, and the gentle Julian Palestini, who wishes only to till the soil of his parents' farm, finds himself a soldier in the midst of the brutal Italian campaign.