Life Without Summer
Fans of Deep End of the Ocean and Good Grief will be transfixed by this stunning debut about family, forgiveness, and the struggle to find hope in healing.
Life Without Summer deftly weaves together the lives of Tessa, a young mother who has just lost her four-year-old daughter in a hit and run accident outside her preschool, and Celia, the grief counselor who tries to help her put her life back together. Once the picture of domestic bliss, Tessa now grapples with the terrible emptiness left by her daughter’s absence, made worse by police insistence that the case is unsolvable. As Celia struggles to keep Tessa from getting caught up in a bleak crusade for answers, she finds that their sessions open the door to emotions she’s spent years ignoring, forcing her to face the rising tensions in her own life– her troubled teenage son, her alcoholic ex-husband, and her fragile new marriage. Celia soon finds that she must come to terms with the tragic mistakes of her own past and the choices that have led her family to the brink of destruction.
Told in two voices, this novel is a haunting portrait of two women whose lives begin to converge unexpectedly when the answers one needs turns out to be the other’s only chance for peace. Life Without Summer illuminates what can happen to one’s self-identity and love relationships in the wake of tragedy. Each woman’s intensely personal journey reverberates universal themes about the connections between love and marriage and truth and forgiveness, which no reader will forget.
This is an insightful, honest book about the nature of grief, loss, love, marriage and divorce…. Lynne Griffin has given readers the gift of a compelling novel of character and of life.
Part who-dunnit, part psychological portraiture, part an argument for the necessity of “facing” grief, Life Without Summer is an always-involving novel. Griffin is a master of the crisp and telling detail, and her troubled main characters are wonderfully human.
There are many deep satisfactions in this absorbing and deftly plotted novel but what I most admired was Lynne Griffin’s wonderfully complex characterization of her two heroines. Tessa and Celia rapidly became like friends in my own life, and I loved listening as they took turns describing
their joys and sorrows. A sparkling debut!
I could not stop reading!! Life Without Summer is what I consider the epitome of smart women’s fiction. Once I picked this book up, I could not put it down and found it utterly real and compelling. This is a deeply satisfying novel that pulls us through the lives of two very different women, either one of whom could be ourselves.