The Summer Before
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Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
If someone you love was assaulted, abused, or was a victim of a crime-you are a secondary victim. If the perpetrator is also someone you love, there are no words. Madeline and Summer are more than best friends. They might as well be sisters; they've claimed the title, anyway-and sisters tell each other everything. But Summer has a secret she's been hiding for years. Someone's been hurting her, someone close, and when it comes out, it destroys everything around her with the force of dying stars. Six years after the trial, Madeline is a haunted young woman trying to build a new life in Boston, but the guilt of her betrayal brings her to the brink of suicide. To let go of the past, Madeline must confront her father, mother, and all those involved with the trial that split her family apart-or continue her descent, finishing what she started to escape it.
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Trigger warnings for CSA and suicide. Also some semi spoilers in this review.
This was a well written book dealing with difficult subject matter. I found the writing itself engaging and well paced, and the protagonist flawed yet sympathetic.
I guess I had a little bit of a disconnect with the book as a whole because it is essentially a book about healing from trauma, but it felt like a lot of that process was skipped over. The majority of the book takes place at a time in her life when Maddie is finally starting to actually face these events from many years ago. We see these confrontations play out (her father, her mother, summer) on the page, but nothing actually changes based on any of them. I don't think that's a bad thing in itself, a large part of dealing with trauma can be recognising what you can't change/control, processing it and moving forward. The problem is that the processing part takes place off the page, with her doctor during a time jump we don't see. The end of the book is a skip into the future, where she still doesn't speak to her father or summer and ignores her mother's willful denial. The only difference really is how she perceives her life. The end just felt a little unsatisfying to me because we didn't experience the healing process with her, we didn't see how she got there.
Overall, wonderful writing on a difficult subject to write well, and worth a read. I'll definitely pick up anything else this author writes. Thanks to the publisher and netgalley for the ARC
