Customer Reviews

The Silk Road: A Novel

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4 star:		(4)
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Jane Summer has created vivid characters and atmosphere from the eyes of a teenage girl who has teenage worries, such as "Do I have pimple on my chin?" or "Why didn't I wash my hair today?" Very accurate and compelling. It kept me awake and reading for a few nights. It's a page turner. Alas, love scenes are a writer's trap, which is proved, unfortunately, in this amazing read. When I finally got to the long anticipated love scene, I felt cheated and turned off by metaphors such as, "she was like a snake, cool to touch. The skin on her face was as thin as sausage casing...her hip rose from her body the way the new Ford Mustang fender rises above the rear wheel...I, impundent dog, sniffed her, breathed in the smell of her toes...armpits...deep in that mound of...pubic hair lay an odor that brought my grandmother's kitchen to mind...Fiona was the smell...of potato bread...in grandmother's old-fashioned toaster" "We lay side by side, like lovers in a grave." How deadly! "Who wants to be compared to pickled herring?" Who, indeed?

This book takes you through a young girls tale and growing up and discovering herself. You see how easy it is to hate your family when you're young, and how it's even easier to adopt another one. The beginning is a bit hard to get through with lots of character development, but it's worth it to stick in there. As Paiges life unravels with the woman in the skylark, you start to remember and feel the naivety of being a teenager and the pure guilt and desire you experience when turing into a woman.

This coming of age trip for baby boomers is riveting, sexy without corn or porn. Straight, gay, bi or tri, you'll appreciate this love-of-my-life story. Summer captures the essense of adolescence without getting boring or trite. A plusses all around: Story, style, content. Hard to believe this is Summer's first, it surely won't be her last. You'll be thinking about this one for awhile. Bring back Paige & Fiona.

Jane Summer has keenly captured a very specific moment in place and time in her story of Paige's growing up in Hell in the 70's: the music, the rhythm of daily life in the 'burbs, and of course the cars! At the same time, the interior story of Paige's sexual and romantic coming of age is in the best sense timeless.

The book took me back; the book moved me. Long live Paige, may she flourish!

Paige Bergman is a high school student in the early 1970s in a town called Hell. Estranged from her parents and lacking enthusiasm for her friends, Paige is awakened by Mrs Fiona Gallagher, whom she first spots driving. Later babysitting for the family, Paige is beguiled by Fiona and desires to know all her secrets. Like a modern-day Lolita, Paige becomes an oasis for the troubled woman and the two are drawn into dangerous waters. With electric characters, enchanting language, and vivid descriptions of a first crush-turned-obsession, Summer has created an impressive and memorable debut. The story is nearly derailed by the final chapter which switches narrators, but that didn't really take away from the entirety of the novel. There are tons of fascinating metaphors and the narrator's voice is so resonant that it's easy to forgive that final stray.

The Silk Road - there is poetry and joy in every sentence - in each word; reading Silk Road awakened something in me that had been lying dormant for far too long; touched me in places that have been untouched; made my heart skip beat after beat; i am on my third reading - i cannot seem to stop - and i don't want to.

One of the best books I've read in a long time--gay or straight. This is a sweet, thoughtful, yet often painful story that makes the reader think hard about love and life. The characters are sharply drawn, the language lovely. When is Jane Summer's NEXT book coming out?

Now i am reading it for the 3rd time! i just find it brings me so much pleasure; awakens something in me that has been lying dormant; touches me in places i have not been touched in a long while; makes my heart skip several beats; and the writing, each and every sentence is a joy to read. if this is getting boring, forgive me, i am still overwhelmed and in awe (a rare and very welcome occurrence)

"Jane Summer has written an engaging, endearing, enchanting first novel. Whether you're gay, straight, male, or female, you will love Paige Bergman, the coolest, fiercest, most screwed-up-yet-brilliant 15-year-old to ever make it through the 1970s. A coming-of-age novel of rare charm and unique vision, The Silk Road is one well worth traveling," said William J. Mann, author of "The Men From the Boys and The Biograph Girl."

"The Silk Road" is Jane Summer's first novel. The main character, Paige Bergman, reminds me a little of J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield and a modern day character from an updated version of "Little Women."
The setting for "The Silk Road" is Hell, New York. "Hell is a real place. Hell is a suburb. A billboard towers over, reading: have you been seriously injured? For the residents of Hell at the end of the 1960s, the metaphoric nature of their existence goes virtually unnoticed. But it doesn't slip past Paige Bergman, an unpredictable, turbulent adolescent hurtling toward adulthood, weathering an overbearing and jealous mother, named Eva and a zombified father, who has been disabled because he was electrocuted, a Buddhist motorcycle-riding lothario, coddled and clueless friends, and, above all, the shivering effects of alienation. As the demons of boredom and dislocation begin to hook in their nails, Paige's wish for salvation is granted when she stumbles upon an ethereal woman at the wheel of a blue Buick Skylark. Spellbound by the beguiling-and pained-Mrs. Gallagher (a.k.a Fiona), Paige sees her fantasies turn into fact, her observation into obsession. What happens after the two meets is as strange, disfiguring, and ultimately emancipating as the explosive flowering of one true love."
As the chapter one begins:
"People go through Hell just to make conversation. They tell you it was serendipity, that they had no choice, the thruway was at a standstill, they needed to find an alternate route. The truth is they go through Hell for kicks. They see the thruway sign, HELL EXIT 15, and have every intention of making the detour. Often they stop in town, gas up, dash into Vera's Luncheonette for a cigar or chewing gum, shifty eyes hoping to find and purchase amusing bumper stickers such as I'VE BEEN TO HELL AND BACK or THIS CAR HAS GONE THROUGH HELL. The bullheaded visitors make jokes about the town name. The residents' response humorless, they depart with no information about the etiology of Hell and no souvenir other than a cigar ring, a Bazooka comic, a cleaner windshield. What an unfriendly town."
Paige takes the reader on her own trip through her high school years in Hell. Her freshmen year begins when she is in her room with the transistor radio turned up. She rolls up socks and places them in her tight jeans. Paige gyrates her hips to the music as she pretends to perform. Her mother walks into Paige's bedroom to tell her to turn down the music. Her mother sees the front of Paige's pants and walks out of the bedroom horrified. That's the last time Paige packs a piece in this book!
The reader travels through Paige journey of finding herself and loving an emotionally unsound Fiona. Paige's coming of age is sometimes funny and sometimes heartbreaking. It is a book that is difficult to put down. It is refreshing to read a book where the sex is left to the reader's imagination.
Even though "The Silk Road" is Jane Summer first novel, she is a writer, poet, and editor living in New York City. Summer is the former senior writer for New Woman magazine and has won numerous writing awards, including The New York Times Dining In/Dining Out Contest and the Literal Latte Poetry Contest. Her work has anthologized in "Literal Latte," "Surrounded by Dreams," "The Women's Guide to Political Power," "The Girls' Guide to Life," and the National Library of Poetry anthology, among others.
"The Silk Road" is well worth the trip through Hell and back!

Jane Summer can write! This novel, alternately hilarious and poetic, and richly grounded in place and time, is acutely honest about the highs and lows of first love--and the highs and lows of growing up in suburbia. I stayed up late reading this one, and can't wait to see this author's next book--Jane, please write us another one!