Summer in the Land of Skin
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Twenty-five-year-old Anna—restless, famished and emotionally numb—is following the long-cold trail of her father, a celebrated luthier, whose death has always haunted her. She's tracked his former business partner to a sailboat on Bellingham Bay, determined to pry from the old man the secrets of their guitarmaking trade, and maybe a few answers about her father.
Anna catches an echo of her musical father in Arlan, guitar player for a local band. Soon she's living on his sofa, hanging out with his girlfriend—having friends for the first time, even. And if Anna's new friends do drugs, read her journal and leave open a few too many bedroom doors, who's to say they aren't real friends? And if Anna has feelings for Arlan, who's to say where her loyalty lies?
During a single summer's worth of days, gin-soaked and colored with longing, Anna rediscovers her senses, shut down since her father's death, and finds that the only way to get free of her past is to embrace it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gehrman's debut skillfully draws the reader into the mind of 25-year-old, emotionally stunted Anna Medina and the universe of damaged folks she encounters in her attempts to "kill father" ("He's dead, but he needs to die a little more") and heal the pain left by his suicide. Chet Medina was a luthier who sold his guitars to Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia; Anna, whose version of living has been observing neighbors through binoculars, decides to go to Bellingham, Wash., to find her father's old guitar-making partner and see if he can help i.e., take her on as an apprentice and tell her about her celebrated, distant father. She is taken in by self-destructive, beautiful Lucy and her quiet, distant boyfriend, Arlan, near the "Land of Skin," a street corner where the faintest hint of sunlight brings out "half-naked natives." Her new friends fight, drink and smoke themselves into a chaotic spiral, and as Anna witnesses their pain and joy she begins to feel alive herself. Gehrman's portrait of a woman deadened from years of grief awakening to a world of emotional risk skillfully avoids maudlin sentiment or hollow histrionics. Her characters are confused, believable and utterly human, which is one of the main reasons the book strikes so many lonely, bewildered and true notes.
