Memories of Summer

Newbery Award winner Ruth White, author of BELLE PRATE'S BOY and WEEPING WILLOW, is one the best young adult authors writing today. Her stories never fail to touch and enlighten her readers. It's 1955, and 13-year-old Lyric moves from the beautiful hills of Virginia with her sister, Summer, and her widowed father, seeking a life of more material gain in Flint, Michigan. Soon the close bond between the sisters begins to fall apart in the excitement of city life. Summer withdraws, becomes an outcast, her fantasy world taking over her real life. Filled with love and pain, this is the story of Summer's descent into mental illness, but also the story of Lyric's blossoming . Narrator Kate Forbes delivers a sweet, honeyed Southern twang, not overdoing it, but getting it just right. She handles the older sister's deterioration with a mix of confusion and bravado. Her understanding of the characters makes them come alive. D.G. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine

August 28, 2000
White's (Belle Prater's Boy) familiar territory of Appalachia in the 1950s is the vividly drawn springboard to this tender, lyrical novel about mental illness. Sisters Summer and Lyric Compton are 16 and 13, respectively, when their Poppy decides to leave the sooty coal mines of rural Virginia for the booming automobile factories of Flint, Mich. Told in Lyric's evocative drawl, the story of their migration contains enough careful observations and insights to carry the tale all by itself. But it is Summer's descent into schizophrenia that emerges as the focal point. Acknowledging that Summer "always did have funny ways about her" (since childhood, Summer has been so afraid of electricity that she won't turn on a light), Lyric and Poppy are not quick to act when Summer's behavior and language grow more and more irrational. But as Poppy gets a job with Chevrolet and moves the family from a squalid apartment to a house of their own, and as Lyric makes friends and begins to say "ree-al-lee" and "yous guys" instead of "no foolin'" and "y'all," Summer's illness encroaches on their lives in an increasingly demanding and dangerous manner. Summer's disintegration inspires confusion, anger and palpable frustration in Lyric before she finally understands her sister's plight. The result is a wise and thoughtful novel, painfully well realized and gently revealed. Ages 10-up.