In Summer [Hardcover]

Jeremy Jackson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2004

Summertime. If you close your eyes you can feel the warm sun on your skin, hear the leaves rustling in the breeze, smell the freshly mown lawn just up the street. Summer is a lush territory. Summer is a realm of its own. And summer can encompass you in a way no other season can. It can swallow you up.

The summer after high school is a time of change for Leo Peery. Upon learning the stunning truth behind why his mother has been acting so distant, Leo throws himself into complex relationships, confused as to whether he hopes to find himself or lose himself amid the complications. With the helpful distractions of bicycle accidents, regretful ex-girlfriends, diving accidents, and the tragic death of a jeep, Leo hopes to forget his troubles. Caught between childhood and adulthood, he will learn before fall the consequences of his actions, and the importance of being honest with himself and the people in his life.

A lush and lyrical trip through the exuberance that is the last summer before responsibility, In Summer tells the story of boundaries we have all crossed. With deceptively effortless writing centering the reader directly in Leo's experiences, Jeremy Jackson creates enormous emotional impact. The joys of summer are simple and satisfying; the sorrows are striking and large. Jackson, author of the critically acclaimed novel Life at These Speeds, has written a stunning tale of personal transformation that manages to simultaneously portray the beauties and brutalities of life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Like Life at These Speeds, his well-received debut, Jackson's second novel takes a close look at a young man's coming-of-age. Narrator Leo Perry is an innocent and sensitive boy fumbling toward adulthood in the summer between high school and college. A lifeguard at the town swimming pool and son of a widowed physician, happy-go-lucky, late-blooming Leo pedals around town on a self-assembled racing bike and sometimes visits his cousins in the bucolic town where his deceased father grew up, where he fishes, makes eyes at a libidinous teen named Freeda and sleeps under the stars. With his mother off on a hard-earned vacation, Leo has the keys to her 1984 mint-condition Supra sports coupe, which he has been charged with selling. But, rifling through her papers one day, Leo discovers that his mother has cancer; "What could I do to help her? If she didn't even tell me, what could I do?" he wonders. But he doesn't dwell on it much, instead flinging himself into life. At times affecting, but mostly a patchwork of anecdotes, this novel reveals Leo's desires for love and connection (he beds classmate Jenny, but develops real feelings for her friend, E.B.) as well as his pleasant and eternal passivity. A procession of minor ailments and accidents stand for youth's attendant emotional growing pains, but readers may not find these-or any of the other vignettes, sweet or sad-add up to a fully satisfying portrait of a vital summer.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

For new high-school graduate Leo Peery, the first days of summer lose their sheen when he discovers that his mother has ovarian cancer. Like the protagonist of Jackson's Life at These Speeds (2002), who keeps trauma at bay by devoting himself to track-and-field, Leo finds relief from painful realities by losing himself in what he does best: flirting and fixing stuff, from a 1984 Corvette to a ramshackle farmhouse. On one hand, there is a lot of scripted-sounding banter between precocious young people here, but, on the other hand, the descriptive passages often read more like The Sun Also Rises than Dawson's Creek: "I undressed and got into bed and I entered sleep quickly and my sleep was deep and I was not worried and I did not dream." By summer's end, Leo settles on a plan that will turn his fix-it talents to more humanistic ends. The symbolism could have been subtler, but many readers will be gratified by Leo's self-discovery, and the flow of Jackson's lean prose, eddying around submerged emotions, exerts an undeniable pull. Jennifer Mattson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; 1st edition (May 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312326424
• ISBN-13: 978-0312326425
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,232,159 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A summer spent in good company!, April 10, 2004

By 

Christopher Carpenter (Iowa) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In Summer (Hardcover)

Leo Peery has just graduated from High School and we follow him through the last summer of his childhood (or is it the first summer of his adulthood?) Handsome, smart and amiable Leo helps his cousin on the family farm, works as a lifeguard, discovers startling information about his mother, gets together with an old girlfriend and with some other girls as well, is nice to small children, goes fishing, restores a car, enjoys life, worries, has a few nasty accidents, makes some mistakes, survives, learns and grows. That's really all there is to it, and what a lovely journey it is. If the story is not as compelling as Jackson's remarkable first novel, Life At These Speeds, it is still a lovely read, full of the joy and beauty of life's simple pleasures. And if the dialogue sometimes seems too clever to be entirely believable, it is so fun to read that all is forgiven. This is Jackson's 2nd novel (he has also written two cookbooks) and I can hardly wait to see what comes next.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Don't bother with this book, April 3, 2005

By 

Paul Allaer (Cincinnati) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In Summer (Hardcover)

I picked this book up just before going on vacation. Having lived through another long winter, the idea of reading a book in which summer plays a key role, was appealing to me. Boy, was I wrong.

"In Summer" tells the story of Leo Peery, who has just graduated from high school and awaits going to college at the end of summer. Leo works as a life guard, and hangs out with friends and relatives, gets involved with girlfriend(s), etc. It's not the story line that is the problem, it's the writing that does not connect with me. It seems very detached. For example, at some point fairly early in the book, Leo finds out that his mom is dealing with a potentially terminal medical problem. One would expect that Leo is devistated, but somehow it doesn't come across the pages.

In summary, despite the author's lenghty and numerous descriptions of the feel of summer as experienced by his 18 year old fictional character, I just didn't feel it and when I finished the book, I thought to myself, 'what did I read this for again?'. Not recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Novel That Transports You, March 18, 2008

By 

S.W. Capps, Author of Salmon Run & Train in t... - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Summer (Hardcover)

At 44, it's not always easy to remember the feelings I had as an 18-year-old, spending summers on the farm in Oklahoma. But Jeremy Jackson's novel, In Summer, transported me back to the days of my youth. The book details the three-month period of time between high school graduation and college, a time of innocence, confusion and trepidation for most of us--the 'last summer of childhood'. Jackson's prose, though simplistic at times, flows like a meandering country road, evoking a sense of unhurriedness, of long summer days and endless nights. Through it all--the bad summer jobs, the girlfriends, the worry over his mother's failing health--the main character, Leo Peery, undergoes a metamorphosis, a 'coming-of-age', if you will. Don't expect an action-packed page turner here. Instead, sit back and enjoy the easy pace of a time gone by, when your whole life--no matter how scary the prospect--was in front of you. Salmon Run