“Wolfson’s writing is superb.” –The Washington Post A novel about mothers and daughters, about taking chances, about exploding secrets and testing the boundaries of family Years ago, during a certain summer in Maine, two young women, unaware of each other, met a charismatic man at a craft fair and each had a brief affair with him. For Jane it was a chance to bury her recent pain in raw passion … pain in raw passion and redirect her life. For Susie it was a fling that gave her troubled marriage a way forward.
Now, sixteen years later, the family lives these women have made are suddenly upended when their teenage girls meet as strangers on social media. They concoct a plan to spend the summer in Maine with the man who is their biological father. Their determination puts them on a collision course with their mothers, who must finally meet and acknowledge their shared past and join forces as they risk losing their only daughters to a man they barely know.
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Favorite Quotes:
It would have been better if that silence between them was thick and heavy with sadness or regret, but it had become light and comfortable now. Hazel and her mother were now connected by only the loosest stitch.
And from that moment on, every subsequent message that Hazel received from Eve was a supernova. Each text blew everything that once was, wide-open. Started life anew. Illuminated every fiber of her being. And it was all happening in Hazel’s own personal universe.
She felt that there was something deep within her that was better than her life allowed for.
Looking down at you, I felt as if I had gone out and bought something too precious and too expensive. It was as if I had walked around a shop I knew I shouldn’t have been in and walked out with something I couldn’t afford.
My Review:
This book was a pleasant surprise and I was rather besotted and bewitched by the outstanding writing quality, which frequently leaped out at me in the most unexpected places. However, the insightfulness and depth of the characters as well as the unexpected corners and nuances of the storylines often left me delightfully stunned and needing to reread passages more than once. This talented wordsmith obviously has a keen memory and profound understanding of the chaotic, confusing, conflicting, calamitous, and crushingly catastrophic emotions and thoughts of a teen as she developed the multi-faceted character of Hazel with devastating clarity. Did I have enough /c/ words there?
Each character was cleverly textured, multi-layered, captivatingly complicated, and endlessly intriguing, even when they greatly annoyed or frustrated me. Ms. Wolfson’s writing was thoughtfully emotive and cleverly observant with deftly penned and well-crafted prose that was often so elegant it snagged my breath. She is definitely going on my list of Ones to Watch. Fangirl down.
Brianna Wolfson is new to me, and I was quite impressed with her. She certainly has a way with words because That Summer in Maine is absolutely beautifully written. The flow, the word choices, everything; it just all comes together so well. The story is a bit different than what I’ve read in women’s fiction, and like them or not, it’s so easy to get wrapped up in the characters’ lives. As mother to a beautiful, strong-willed daughter – many of those growing up years spent as a single mother, and then a blended family – it wasn’t hard to connect with these characters. There were some aspects of the story that stretched the believability scale, at least for me, but this is fiction after all. It’s a little over the top at times, but it’s not so far out there that it diminished my enjoyment of the read. All in all, this one is about family – what makes a family and all the drama that goes along with it. It’s an emotional story, and one I won’t soon forget.
I received an ARC from NetGalley and Harlequin-Trade Publishing US& Canada. This was a different book but one that I enjoyed reading very much.
The book is the journey of 2 mothers who had a brief affair with a man in Maine and they both got pregnant at about the same time even though they didn’t know it for a long time. Their journey lets us see the decisions they made and where they went in life. They each tell us their story and then both had girls and we get to see the journey of the girls who as teenagers met on social media. It was interesting when the mothers wrote to their daughter about how they messed up their lives, then to see how their choices affected their daughters but then we saw how much they learned from it.
There was the father that one of his daughters showed up one summer and learned she had a half-sister. She made a connection with her on social media and told her about their father and she went to see him last summer and was going back this year. They both went to see him and that was intriguing because it felt like on the surface all was well but I felt like it was an act. The day finally did come when we found out what was going on.
The author wrote this book with so much feeling that you could feel what they were going through. Through the writing of the mothers, we saw how much they learned from writing what they went through and got a clearer picture of what was really going on. You know how sometimes when you’re just living life you don’t see a lot of what is really going on but when you tell someone or write it down, you see things differently. I could see that is this story. I liked that the author took us on the journey of the girls and how they really felt and what their mother’s decisions did to them.
I think this book is an eye-opener because so many times we don’t think about how our decisions affect someone else. I highly recommend this book and think Nrianna Wolfson did an amazing job telling the story of their journey.