Comparable to Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Roberto Bolano’s Savage Detectives, and Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, I Was a Teenage Communist tells the story of a group of diverse, non-conformist teenagers in high school during the Reagan era. With punk rock music as its soundtrack a group of teens discover Marxism and romance in the heart of Ronald Reagan’s America and find that in Orange County California asserting one’s sexual, political and racial identity can be hazardous to one’s health.

“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.”