Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy

I read this book when I was 19 years old in my first year of university. I started out at a 60's-style school where everyone had to take a social sciences course that focused on world literature, and we covered Franz Fanon and stages of colonialism, Uncle Tom's Cabin and gender and race issues... this is decades ago now, so I don't remember all we read, but this book stood out from even that list of carefully selected prose. This is not the copy I read at the time, that copy was the old smaller paperback size that actually fit in a pocket, and had a green cover with a ragged sketch of a figure on it, not this cheesy rose watercolour that has nothing to do with the story. This should be the cover of her novel He, She and It, where roses really do appear, as symbols of human feeling and fragility. Weird. Anyway, between the title and the cheesy cover, you might be put off, so blame the publisher for that, not the writer.
   Woman on the Edge of Time is the story of a bruised and marginalized woman who finds herself in the future, somehow. Neither she nor we can be sure if her experiences are real or imagined, and since she spends a large portion of the story in Belleview Psych Hospital, there are plenty of doubters around her to support her uncertainty. We never know whether the future worlds Connie sees are solid or hallucinations, but that doesn't stop them from being compelling, thought provoking, and even inspiring. This is a story of Power and the Powerless, and the ways they defeat each other; of paths to the future and where they will take us; and of the immediate present and the ways we address it. I've read this book half a dozen times, every few years, really, because it gives me a little hope for the future and a few new lessons on how to work toward a good one.
I don't know what happened to my first copy, but I lost a lot of books to mold in a storage room I left them in to go traveling, so I might have lost it then. This copy, I got from my favourite bookstore for unused books, Book City. I sought it out many years after I lost it because the future worlds and the characters that inhabited them stuck with me, and I found myself describing them to people sometimes when we talked about politics and the world and what we should do. This book became part of my worldview, and what better good can a writer do?
Now that I've said all that, it seems wrong to let this book go, but I've read it so many times, I could probably recite it, so I guess I'll let this one go, along with my heartfelt thanks to a great teacher. And in retrospect, I see thanks are also due to the professor who included this book in her syllabus, Ms. Banerjee.
Score - 0 (2 books saved, 2 released)