Customer Reviews

Summer Light (Hardscrabble Books-Fiction of New England)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Robinson is a fine writer, with a spare, edgy style, and tells a good story. Two sisters and their husbands, lovers, and children share the rental of a Maine beach cottage and get to know each other better...or worse. The main character, an aimless, about-to-be-divorced photographer with a small son, lives with and off her lover, a tense and unlikable lawyer. Her sister married the man she saw ---and fell in love with first--- when she was a teenager. The sisters' relationship is strained (do they really know each other?), but the end of the summer offers hope for a new understanding. The sister's husband is affable, but the main character's lover is problematic. He wants to marry her, and she seems to come around to accepting, but can it be anything but a mistake? Open-ended, almost-tragic climax resolves little of the tensions between the protagonists, though, and leaves the reader hanging and wondering what's next.

The novel has a premise that every reader can relate to, such as struggling relationships and internal struggles with shortcomings. The setting description is beautifully done and leaves one with a feeling of homesickness for places never visited before. The description of the New England coast is charming and absorbing

Roxana Robinson has become one of my favorite authors. She writes with exquisite style and her characters are really believable. Her novels focus on families in crisis situations, usually as the result of divorces and second marriages. She writes especially well on the subject of children traumatized by divorce. In both this book and This Is My Daughter, this leads to a shocking ending. It's interesting to speculate what will happen to the characters here. The main character, Laura, does a lot of growing during this summer and learns to see things from others' point of view. This book is so well constructed, there are no unnecessary scenes or characters. The author is really gifted and I would highly recommend any of her novels.

This book was an easy read with characters that were very realistic. It did, however, seem to lack something and I really could never get excited to turn the pages. I was ready for the book to end and was a bit let down with the abrupt ending. It was like, "what happened?" '

It is summer in England. Sisters, Laura and Sarah, decide to go on a summer holiday together. Sarah takes her two children; Laura takes her son and her man friend.

Laura's man friend's head rules his heart; "she knew he believed that logic supported the world". He was amazingly similar to her ex-husband. Remembering her ex-husband, she once said to him, "if I were any other woman in the whole world, lying here, you'd want to make love to me." He replied, "I guess you're right," and continued reading.

Laura realized that she was destined to be with men without feelings and unemotional assurances: "she spent her life listening to men who told her that things would work when she knew that they would not - her vacuum cleaner, her carburetor, her marriage."

Laura and Sarah lament together. Their entire summer holiday is spent looking back at their past - their past relationships and their past jobs. Laura was a free-lance photographer but hadn't worked for a long while. She blames her "fear of failure" as the reason for not starting anything of consequence.

It is Laura's son, Sammy, who makes the two women realize that it was a holiday wasted, when he beckons the two into the waters of the ocean. They politely refuse, giving reasons of past experiences that were none too pleasant (the water was wretchedly cold; one caught a chill; and the other nearly drowned). As Sammy runs toward the in-coming tide, he looks back and tells them he is running towards the future. Laughing, he says, "You two are always so miserable. I'm going into the ocean, towards the future, no matter what it will be like. I will swim towards happiness".

Martina Nicolls, Author of "The Sudan Curse" and "Kashmir on a Knife-Edge"

A realistic story, charming and enjoyable light reading, but lacking something. I was quite disappointed.