The Summer Before

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