The Summer We Got Free

As I read the first sentence of this book a small ball of tension formed inside my chest, a ball that would not go away until I set the book aside and went about the rest of my day. Even thinking of reading the book (“Maybe I'll go to the coffeeshop”) caused the tension ball to form and harden. I don't know why I experienced this book so extremely and so physically. Maybe it's the fact that I knew there would be violence - it says so on the book jacket - and waiting for its appearance on the page was stressing me out. Maybe it's because I knew this book would have LGBTQ themes, and I was afraid of whether or not that would be attached to the promised violence. I just don't know. In any case, this book created the bizarre situation where I needed to read the book, ate it up, could not put it down, while at the same time experiencing very real and extreme levels of stress every time I touched the cover.

Okay, enough about all that, the main issue is: was it a good book, or not? Friends, it was a fantastic book.

This book is extraordinary. I'm super happy my book club picked it because it's not the sort of thing I would normally have read (well, it turned out to be, but based on the description I wouldn't have picked it up). But seriously... it's fantastic.