The Last Summer of Ada Bloom

Starred review from December 23, 2019
Murray’s masterful adult debut (after the Cedar B. Hartley and Henrietta children’s series) explores a family’s fraught relationships in a small Australian town in the early 1980s. Awakened during a sweltering, mosquito-plagued night, nine-year-old Ada sees her father, Mike, having sex with a family friend. In the morning, Ada tells her older sister, Tilly, that she saw their father doing “something bad.” Tilly confronts Mike to no avail, which drives a wedge between him and his daughters. The girls also struggle with their mother, Martha, who treats 17-year-old Tilly especially coldly, leading Ben, the 15-year-old favorite middle child, to conclude that Martha must be jealous of Tilly’s talent on the piano. Murray nimbly illustrates the tensions running through the family using various points of view, describing emotions and events with fluid precision. A glimpse of Tilly “like a just-opened flower” sends Martha into a “sudden tumult of yearning for her own youth and the familiar tang of regret that she had lost it.” As the second act unfolds, the married couple’s entwined relationship with Mike’s college friend Arnold emerges through a series of eerie scenes that illuminate the roots of Martha’s bitterness, as well as Mike’s compulsion toward infidelity. Murray’s unflinching, intuitive tale will satisfy readers who like their family dramas with a strong dose of darkness.

February 1, 2020
A family begins to come apart at the seams over the course of a summer in a small Australian town in the early 1980s. Young Ada Bloom, a dreamy child prone to "looking deeply into things and making up mysteries," finds her world turned upside down when she stumbles upon her father, Mike, in flagrante delicto with family friend Susie Layton. But Mike's secret, which Ada shares with her beloved older sister, Tilly, only widens the cracks in the foundation of the Bloom family. Self-absorbed matriarch Martha favors cricket-star son Ben at the expense of Tilly and struggles to be a loving mother to her children while concealing her own dark secret. Tilly, desperate to escape her mother, dreams of Melbourne and her dreamy crush, Raff Cavallo. In her first novel for adults, Murray (Marsh and Me, 2019) paints a vivid picture of the complications of family life and particularly of childhood. While Murray's adult characters can feel static, her younger protagonists, Tilly and Ada in particular, are immediately gripping. Murray deftly illustrates Tilly's internal contradictions; at once a rebellious teenager and a young girl frightened of the future, she is startled by her own declaration that she hopes to leave her small hometown. Her spontaneous announcement feels "like a reach for the self she wanted to be, the self that had tottered forward." Ada's disillusionment with her father is similarly balanced by a stubborn belief in the world's beauty and her own force of will; Mike despairs at his cynicism in the face of Ada's "own raw little love." Regrettably, the plot loses steam instead of building to a satisfying climax. Nevertheless, there is much here to admire. An empathetic family story that works best when illuminating the inner lives of its young female protagonists.

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March 15, 2020
Beneath an abandoned windmill is a dark hole, so deep that when nine-year-old Ada throws a stick into the well she can't hear it land. Her family is also built on dark secrets, ones that threaten to crumble the foundations of their lives. While Ada spends the summer exploring with the energy of childhood, her brother, Ben, is bent on proving his athletic prowess, and their older sister, Tilly, is on the cusp of young adulthood, rapidly becoming too sophisticated for Ada's childish games. But when Ada witnesses their father, Mike, having sex with another woman in the family living room, she shares this secret with her sister, who then tells her father what they know. Murray perfectly captures the claustrophobia of family life, driven by an emotional barometer that swings from tender feelings of closeness and belonging to long-simmering resentment and regret. As the ramifications of Mike's affair lead to serious consequences, other hidden parts of the family's past are revealed, in a story that's about both coming-of-age and truth coming to light.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)