Summer sisters

The storyline is good. And so is the ‘drama'. But it has a couple of scenes that make it more of an er.. adult book.

Should have given up when the “Thanks to some distant Cherokee ancestor I have these cheekbones” and “She was the best looking of the children with her auburn hair and fair skin” I kept reading because I was interested in what Judy Blume, an author I associate with middle grade fiction would write and publish for adults.

A true emotional roller coaster about friendship and what people think is friendship until they take a hard look inside themselves.

A spontaneous friendship: Caitlin, the dazzling heiress who eccentrically runs around The Island barefoot and Vix, the poor girl from the opposite side of the tracks who is trying to forge her own path.

Blume writes children so very well. Caity and Vix's summer adventures on The Island felt so real, especially when they did terribly stupid things. Kids have to be free to make mistakes so they can learn from them.

Puberty took the form of The Power, and it made me smile every time. Womxn do have a power all their own. Caity and Vix's summers on The Island were so sweet and adorable, a coming-of-age tale.

Vix's courage and tenacity to say no to Caity's wanderlust is admirable, especially while she's constantly being eclipsed by Caity. Vix gives Caity so much of herself, but Caity just doesn't value their friendship the same way.

I almost out this book down half a dozen times due to the choppy POV shifts from peripheral characters cluttering the main character arcs and pacing, but I'm glad I stuck with it because I definitely didn't see the end coming.

I definitely originally read this book on a beach trip with a friend while a teenager, so this had the glow of nostalgia for me, calling my name from the cart outside a used bookstore. It's certainly very readable (took me less than a day), and has a few things going for it: I think the third-person narration of multiple characters could have felt choppy, but was more successful than I would have anticipated. I also find the pearl-clutching in goodreads reviews about how the sexuality of teenage girls is portrayed pretty funny - I think Blume is particularly gifted at capturing the hormonal cyclone (for both genders!) of adolescence, and there were many parts of the intensity of teenage crushes and unfocused-yet-persistent drumbeat of sexual energy that rang exquisitely true to my own experience. There's also some compelling observations about typically unspoken socioeconomic differences that I definitely missed as a teenaged reader. What didn't feel particularly enjoyable overall, however, is that although the characters all make complicated and interesting moral choices, Blume doesn't really provide them adequate interiority for the reader to see how each of the characters grapple with and/or avoid feelings related to those choices. This is particularly true because there's no narration for one of the two “summer sisters” (the one who isn't the protagonist), so she (and arguably the other characters as well, although to slightly lesser degrees) flattens further and further as a character as they move into adulthood. I'd summarize it in saying this is one of those 3-star reviews that feels like a 3-star when you're reading it, but doesn't leave a memorable aftertaste, so slides down into 2-star territory.

Definitely a book for those who enjoyed Judy Blume's books as pre-teen girls; I was not one of those girls. Her characters have always been remarkably flat, for residing in books that have been somewhat controversial and tackled some private adolescent themes very intimately. I found the characters in this book for “adults” to be very much the same; the story extends beyond the characters' youths and has (rather boring) sex scenes, and therefore must be written for grownups, right? Not really. There's unfortunately not much going on here, and I was somewhat disappointed. The fact that the plot is overdone and cliched doesn't really help, and neither does Blume's confusing use of shifting narrators during small, first-person vignettes without changing the narrative voice.