The Summer Demands

April 1, 2019
The women at the center of Shapiro’s uneven second novel (after The Sun in Your Eyes) are in flux. Emily, just shy of 40, uprooted her and her husband David’s life in Chicago to take over a Massachusetts summer camp she inherited from her deceased aunt and uncle. She has big plans for the camp—they’ll make it into a resort and host artist residencies and provide housing for refugees—but realizes upon arriving there the enormity of that task. While David works long hours, Emily puts off the renovation, halfheartedly applies for jobs and wanders the campgrounds, dealing with the residual grief of having recently miscarried. One day, she finds 22-year-old Stella, a barista with blue nails, living in one of the cabins. Enamored by Stella’s brash charm, Emily lets Stella stay and befriends her. Their relationship evolves in surprising and increasingly intimate ways over the course of a summer, and the monotony of Emily’s previous unhappiness is disrupted by the shock of Stella’s youth and relative fearlessness. Shapiro grapples with not uncommon themes, but unfortunately doesn’t bring much new to the table. Shapiro is a thoughtful and capable writer and perfectly renders the arc of a summer affair, but there’s a tepidness to the book that lets it down.

April 1, 2019
A woman struggling to find direction in life finds herself drawn to a younger woman in Shapiro's (The Sun in Your Eyes, 2016) latest. Emily and her husband, David, are living at a summer camp that was once run by Emily's aunt and uncle but has since gone out of business. Their own plans to reopen the camp as a high-end resort have gone aground, and while David has gone back to work, Emily is biding her time as she attempts to come to terms with a miscarriage and unsuccessful fertility treatments. But one day she meets Stella, a college-aged woman secretly living in a bunkhouse on the camp grounds. The two quickly strike up a close friendship that morphs into something more intimate--and potentially dangerous for Emily's marriage even though it brings her a joy and comfort she hadn't known she needed. Emily is a sympathetic protagonist, a woman who is beginning to feel doors closing in her life even though she doesn't feel like an "adult." Stella is no less captivating, embodying youthful freedom and vulnerability. Together, they make for an electrifying duo, and the strange and blurred relationship that emerges between them is charged to the point of creating an edge-of-your-seat tension. While the plot can feel low-stakes, the emotional connection between the two women is captivating and complex.

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May 1, 2019
Following a devastating miscarriage, Emily and her husband, David, decide to move to the abandoned summer camp she has inherited from her great-aunt. They have vague ideas about turning the property into a corporate retreat or a shelter for refugees, but mostly Emily just wanders around recalling her own camp experiences as a girl. One day she comes across a squatter?Stella, a 22-year-old barista who has been living in one of the cabins and is dealing with her own loss, having just broken up with her girlfriend. Emily and Stella form a bond that is part summer-camp pals, part mother and daughter, and part, maybe, lover. But their relationship changes when David learns of Stella's presence, and more changes occur as a few more people, including Alice, Stella's ex, enter the picture. Building the novel around just a handful of characters gives it the compression of a play and allows Shapiro (Sun in Your Eyes, 2016) to focus on subtle shifts in relationships. For readers who like thoughtful women's fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)