Last Summer
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3.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
“A thoughtful social commentary and tender narration of friendship and loyalty” from the bestselling author of A Wedding on the Beach (Publishers Weekly).
The town of Yorktide, close to Maine’s beautiful beaches and the city of Portland, seems like the perfect place to raise a family. For Jane Patterson, there’s another advantage: her best friend, Frannie Giroux, lives next door, and their teenaged daughters, Rosie and Meg, are inseparable. But in the girls’ freshman year of high school, everything changes. Rosie—quiet, shy, and also very pretty—attracts the sneers and slights of a clique of older girls. Over time, the bullying worsens. When Meg betrays their friendship, fearful that she too will be targeted, Rosie suffers an emotional breakdown.
Blaming both Meg and Frannie, Jane tries to help Rosie heal while dealing with her own guilt and anger. In the months that follow, each struggles with the ideas of forgiveness and compassion, of knowing when a friendship is shattered beyond repair—and when hope can be salvaged, one small moment at a time…
Praise for Holly Chamberlin
“Nostalgia over real-life friendships lost and regained pulls readers into the story.”—USA Today on Summer Friends
“A great summer read but with substance. It will find a wide audience in its exploration of sisterhood, family, and loss.”—Library Journal on Summer with My Sisters
“A dramatic and moving portrait of several generations of a family and each person’s place within it.”—Booklist on The Family Beach House
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Friends are forever in this exploration of bullying a troubling hot-button topic that comes into shocking focus here for two families torn apart by a heartless clique of mean girls. Sweet and sensitive Rosie, an only child, spirals into a dangerous depression and breakdown including "cutting" and anorexia after she's targeted by a crew of nasty teens and then betrayed by best friend Meg, who blurts out an embarrassing secret to the bully pack. "Meg broke a solemn oath... I feel like dying," Rosie confides in increasingly heartbreaking and frightening diary entries. The campaign of harassment also drives a painful wedge between the girls' mothers, Jane and Frannie, who agonize over their children's pain as well as their own damaged friendship. Even the rock-solid marriage of Rosie's parents, Jane and Mike, begins to crack under the strain of the cruel harassment, as they both lie about their shared guilt. Chamberlin (Summer Friends) is pitch-perfect in her depiction of Rosie and Meg struggling to grow up, love, and forgive themselves and each other. But the rush to a happily-ever-after ending for everyone turns a thoughtful social commentary and tender narration of friendship and loyalty into a sticky-sweet after-school special.
