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Still Summerby Jacquelyn Mitchard |
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Mitchard's 'Still Summer' plunges into terror
By Carol
Secure your life preserver. Tie yourself to the mast. It's late August, but it's still summer, and Jacquelyn Mitchard is taking you on a thrill ride you won't forget.
Mitchard made her mark in the literary world in 1996 when TheDeep End of the Ocean was chosen as the first pick for Oprah Winfrey's now-legendary book club. Since then, she has written six other novels, but none matches the suspenseful pitch of Still Summer.
It's a tale of terror on the high seas, but this is no Pirates of the Caribbean wannabe.
Readers know something terrible is going to happen, but Mitchard ratchets up the suspense by allowing her story to unfold at a leisurely pace. She painstakingly fleshes out her characters, because as readers will discover, their temperaments and personalities are as crucial to the story as the mounting disasters.
Tracy Kyle, Holly Solvig and Olivia Montefalco, lifelong friends in their early 40s, charter a yacht and two-man crew for a sailing vacation that will take them from
The trip starts out as an innocent adventure in paradise until two accidents in quick succession strand the women without their crew. What else can go wrong? In a word, everything. The engine conks out, the sails are torn, lack of electricity spoils their food and limits their drinking water - and then there's the injury to Holly's leg.
Nature's fury, murderous drug dealers and, possibly most deadly of all, their own frailties and secrets are added to the list.
Readers will wring their hands with frustration, weep with sadness and second-guess the choices these women make. But since characters must do the bidding of the authors who create them, we can only sit back - or sit on the edge of our seats - and let Mitchard's terror-filled tale wash over us.
From Amazon.com Review:
Guest Reviewer: Jodi Picoult
From the provocative and gut-wrenching The Pact, to the brilliant genre-bending The Tenth Circle, to Nineteen Minutes, her most recent novel about a high-school shooting, Jodi Picoult's riveting novels center on family and relationships, and bring to light questions and issues that remain with a reader long after the last page is turned.
In one of my novels, I describe life as what happens when the what-if's don't. In Jacquelyn Mitchard's book, Still Summer, we lucky readers get tumbled into a world where extraordinary things happen to ordinary women; where the what-if's don't only become a reality, but a nightmare that truly puts into perspective what's important in life, and who we truly are.
Mitchard has always excelled at capturing the details of a fictional character with such a finely drawn hand that it's easy to believe you know the people who inhabit her books--that you may have had coffee with them, or passed them on the street. Sometimes her characters are so real to me I have to close the book to cry; or I find myself yelling at them out loud. The ladies of Still Summer--a band of high-school friends who have long since grown up--base their connection to each other on the past, when they were tough-talking Catholic schoolgirls called the Godmothers. But where Tracy, Holly, and Janis went on to marry and live quiet suburban lives, Olivia became an Italian countess, living the kind of life the others could only dream about. Reunited for a Caribbean sailing voyage after Olivia's husband's death, we watch the women come to terms with the fact that our memories of the past are often colored by nostalgia; that friends who fit together seamlessly years ago might, with the passing of time, find it harder to align.
The book begins in familiar territory--women whose lives that are peppered with recalcitrant kids, clueless husbands, the double-handed shuffle of home and career. At the last minute, Janis begs out of the trip to tend to an ailing husband--leaving Tracy's daughter, Cammie, to take her place--in spite of the fact that the relationship between mother and daughter is rocky and cavernous. And then, just as suddenly as a rogue wind, the book takes a shocking turn--leaving these women in a crisis situation that leaves them not only fighting for their lives, but revising their own understanding of friendship, family, and loyalty.
What is it about a Mitchard novel that rises so far above others? The realism, the grace of the characters who people it, and the heartbreaking truths that sneak up on a reader when we least expect it. Still Summer reminds us that sometimes it takes a tragedy to learn what's beautiful about ordinary life; that sometimes we have to travel great distances to figure out how we define "home"; and perhaps most importantly, that we do not know anyone as well as we think--not our daughters, not our friends, and not even ourselves. --Jodi Picoult
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Jumbled and disappointing -  |
Still Summer Review |
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I am really stunned and fairly insulted by the lackluster quality of this book. I know Mitchard can do ten times better than this. Yet, she doesn't. The dialogue is redundant and often cryptic. The pacing (at least in the first half) is sluggish. The characters are either boring or downright mean. Some paragraphs read like first-draft jumbles that I have to re-read two or three times to understand.
All this and I haven't even finished it yet. I don't think I will. I'm sad that she didn't try harder to edit this and make it more reader-friendly. When spending $15 on a brand new book, I expect someone's best effort. |
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Intriguing Story, Too Many Errors - |
Still Summer Review |
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Remember when the teacher told you to "never judge a book by its cover?" Now I do, but when I bought this book I did not. I report to you that I paid the consequences by reading a book fraught with errors and improbabilities making the suspension of disbelief impossible.
The plot sounds intriguing, four middle aged friends plan a Caribbean holiday aboard a crewed charter. The back cover promises us a "desparate fight for survival" as the women "battle the elements, the threats of modern day piracy, and their own frailties." Sounds intriguing enough to occupy a summer's afternoon or two on the annual cruise. As I began to read the book, the first words I read were in the Acknowledgements, it was then that I realized my afternoon might not go so well. Mitchard writes, "This is a work of fiction. The author is neither a sailor nor a geographer [uh-oh], and the events described in this book might not have happened exactly how and when where they did in the fictional world. [huh?]" If these events did not happen in the fictional world, where did they happen? One thing for certain, the author spends the next 300 or so pages proving that she is neither a sailor nor a geographer. Heck, I don't think she every looked a map of the Caribbean! And when was the last time you "yanked on your jib?" Before roller furling, I always hanked on my jib. Or perhaps this was a Freudian slip? To be certain, the plot was interesting, the characters ones with which you could identify (especially if you're a middle aged woman), and the writing skilled enough to build sufficient tension to keep the reader reading. But, and here's a big but, if you're a sailor, if you have some knowledge of the Caribbean, you will repeatedly stumble over the inaccuracies in the book and in the story. It didn't need to be this way, if Mitchard had only done her homework a little better. If only her editor had given the book to a sailor before publishing. If only Mitchard had gone down to the Chicago Yacht Club and asked for some advice, we'd have a better story for sailors and everyone else. The errors are many, detracting from what could have been a great story. And then there are the loose ends, dangling like participles from a poorly formed sentence and too numerous to report here. If only I had remembered my teacher's lesson. Dave Lochner NauticalReads |
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starts slow, picks up speed and intensity -  |
Still Summer Review |
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I listened to the book over a three week period. At first, it was a bit dull in the set-up of the main characters. Once however, the women go on their boat trip, the pace picks ups significantly. I couldn't wait to listen each day on my commute to and from work. Some elements were predictable while others did surprise me. This book doesn't get a five star review as some of the characters and storyline are rather predictable and fit a stereotype.
For example, the pirates are introduced early in the story, with the two men from South America as hideous individuals, reinforcing every bad story we have ever heard or read about criminals. It is obvious to the reader that the women and the pirates will have an encounter and that it will not be a good one. What Mitchard does well though is throw in some unexpected twists and turns within these predictable scenes, that kept me focused on how it would all end. Overall, a good listen. Not sure how it is to read. Some other reviews have not been favorable in the book format. |
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Very entertaining beach read. Characters? Not so much -  |
Still Summer Review |
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I liked the book a lot and it was a nice semi-lurid read, but some of it bugged me (SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT):
1) Too much about the characters' beauty or former beauty or weight gain or fact that it was good that one wasn't delusional enough to dare to wear a bikini on their PRIVATE boat trip due to that "extra 20 pounds." Obsessive self-hatred much? 2) The whole pirates thing? Intriguing, but I didn't buy it. I liked the young American guy's story, but I just didn't believe for a minute that they would have been able to fend off rapists, sorry. And this part of the story read for all the world like a bad "romance" novel complete with lecherous swarthy men and enticing, duplicitous swinging of hips. That's all I got! |
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Flawed, but interesting and fun - |
Still Summer Review |
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Warning - hints about the book, maybe even outright spoilers!
Jacquelyn Mitchard has written an adventure on the sea involving old school friends and a daughter. When four old school friends schedule an adventure in the Carribean, one wimps out, and the teen daughter of one takes her slot on the boat staffed by two owner/operators. What happens next was riveting enough to keep me up one night reading, and overall, I enjoyed this book. It is not, however, perfect. Olivia turns out to be extremely narcissistic, and somehow the other friends hadn't figured that out yet. The friend left behind in the beginning, Janis, becomes a little over-the-top in her adventure at the end - for example, wouldn't she have gone to her surviving friends instead of hauling a boat back to St. Thomas? The surprise twist was seen way, way too early, so the surprise factor was lost. In one part of the book, the wrong character name was used. Still, this book was fun, and entertaining, and deserves three stars. |
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