Ellen Halter’s debut novel All That I’m Asking (Rootstock Publishing, 2026) is set in Astoria, Queens in the 1960s.
The novel follows a young woman who becomes a journalist as the country is being transformed by the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement, second-wave feminism and student activism.
It’s the summer of 1968 when Alice Kaplan, a twenty-year-old college student, is assaulted by her chauvinistic boss during a dizzying date on a Ferris Wheel. She fights and flees, running home only to find her father has suddenly died of a heart attack.
Grief-stricken, Alice is forced to leave her studies at Cornell University due to the financial and family pressures. Finding traditional journalism jobs scarce for women, she is catapulted into the working world.
Struggling against the sexism of the era, a grief-stricken and naive Alice — who longs to be a writer — stumbles into the tumultuous life of a countercultural newspaper reporter in New York City.
All That I’m Asking is a fast-paced novel where one woman’s resilience and tenacity leads to liberation.
Author Ellen Halter has a PhD in rhetoric and composition from Wayne State University and has taught composition to freshmen there and at University of Toledo. She’s spent the last twenty years focusing on her own writing, both fiction and poetry.
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