One Summer
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3.4 • 84 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
David Baldacci delivers a moving, family drama about learning to love again after terrible heartbreak and loss in this classic New York Times bestseller—soon to be a Hallmark original movie.
It's almost Christmas, but there is no joy in the house of terminally ill Jack and his family. With only a short time left to live, he spends his last days preparing to say goodbye to his devoted wife, Lizzie, and their three children. Then, unthinkably, tragedy strikes again: Lizzie is killed in a car accident. With no one able to care for them, the children are separated from each other and sent to live with family members around the country.
Just when all seems lost, Jack begins to recover in a miraculous turn of events. He rises from what should have been his deathbed, determined to bring his fractured family back together. Struggling to rebuild their lives after Lizzie's death, he reunites everyone at Lizzie's childhood home on the oceanfront in South Carolina. And there, over one unforgettable summer, Jack will begin to learn to love again, and he and his children will learn how to become a family once more.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Legal thriller fixture Baldacci (Deliver Us from Evil) churns out a creaky, contrived family drama about Jack Armstrong, a terminally ill family man just praying to make it to Christmas. Sadness abounds, much more so when Jack's wife, Lizzie, is killed in a car wreck while on a medicine run. Plans are made by Jack's mean mother-in-law Bonnie: the three kids will get divided up among aunts and uncles across the country, and Jack will be put into hospice. Miraculously, Jack's health turns around, and he's able to reclaim his kids and move the brood from Ohio to the South Carolina shore where Lizzie grew up. There, he tries to reassemble the family and learn how to be a single parent, and just as they're beginning to settle into a functional family again, Bonnie sues for custody of the kids. Yes, it possesses all the subtlety of a dog fight, but it's also choked with pap ("No matter what you do, no matter how hard you fight, life sometimes just doesn't make sense") and so sappy you'd think Baldacci was earning a commission on each tear jerked.
Customer Reviews
One Summer (Enhanced)
If there was ever an eye opener into the mind and body of one of America's fighting warriors and the simple yet complex story behind the man, his life, his dreams and the unknown reality that we all face, the story of Jack Armstrong, opens those doors. He loved deeply, cared deeply and committed himself fully to life as he once knew it and as it turns on him over the course of a short life, well lived, but reborn, after being faced with certain death, with a new outlook on life and a new meaning to what's important and what is not. David has truly given life and meaning to someone who thought he was gone from his family's life but became a new man and showed everyone the reason for living is with the future and is only guided by our past.