Customer Reviews

Summers at Blue Lake: A Novel

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

 

 

The secrets of BJ's family are nothing like I could have imagined! This book quickly gains momentum and just keeps running; I could barely put it down- finished it in 2 days even with 2 small children of my own. The "flashbacks" are very easy to follow. A wonderful book that is just a plain, great read. Enjoy!

A haunting story about love, family and family secrets. The story revolves around the choices we make in the name of love and the never ending ripples it creates in our family. It sprinkles in family history and heritage real or imagined, accepted or shunned. Summers at Blue Lake has strong characters that you want to know personally. The nostalgia can take you back to the summers of your youth and things you never grasped or comprehended. A quick read.

I loved this book. I bought it Saturday morning and started reading it at my Saturday morning pedicure. I couldn't put it down and finished it Sunday afternoon between loads of laundry. If any of you are involved in a book club, it would be a great book for that. Lots of good discussion could come from a book like this. It's a book about family secrets, remembering your teen summers, about going through divorce, about loving yourself and deciding what and who you are. A great summer read.

And as a note to Publisher's Weekly: Precociousness is spelled wrong in your review and isn't used properly even if it were. Precocious means having an unusual maturity at an early age...like a precocious child. How could "the novel falls victim to prose leaden with preciousness" even make sense? I personally loved the analogies made in this book. A couple of times, I thought to myself... "That was brilliant...How did she come up with that!"

Try it, I think you will like it as much as I did.

The author seems to think that 'lesbians' are merely women who have had bad experiences with men. One of the lesbian grandmothers was molested by her step-father, then raped and rejected by her prospective husband a few days before their wedding. The rape resulted in a pregnancy. She 'becomes a lesbian' only to be able to stay with her daughter, the result of the rape. The other lesbian grandmother grew up in Greece, where the 'culture' of Greek adolescence encouraged her to play sex games with both boys and girls, thus somehow turning her into a lesbian after her husband dies in World War II. I am at the heterosexual end of the continuum of sexual orientation, but my reading of the research literature suggests that these scenarios for creating a lesbian sexual orientation are way off base. I was deeply disappointed that the book cover didn't give some clue as to the contents, as I wouldn't have bothered to read the book if I had known. The novel is a not-very-subtle anti-gay statement, even though the two women are portrayed sympathetically. Otherwise, a C- as a novel.