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The Summer Demands
By Deborah Shapiro
Catapult, 9781948226301, June 2019, 224pp.

The Short of It:

Gave me all the feels of The Big Chill but with a smaller cast of characters.

The Rest of It:

On the verge of her fortieth birthday, Emily inherits an abandoned summer camp from her aunt. She and her husband move there, with the hopes of transforming it into an artist colony. The old, main house is full of charm and memories but the rest of the camp is in need of repair. They both realize it will take quite a bit of resources to get it to where it needs to be. What they don’t immediately realize though is that they already have their first guest.

I really enjoyed The Summer Demands. Emily and her husband are in a good place. Even though she is without a job and trying to find her way again after suffering a miscarriage, Emily is hopeful if not a little lost. But when she stumbles upon Stella, a twenty-something who is essentially squatting on their property, her first reaction is to help her, not oust her and she holds that secret for a little while before telling her husband.

It’s these moments between Stella and Emily that cause so much tension. Female friendships and intimacy, envy, jealousy and longing. Emily is a tad infatuated with Stella but when Stella meets Emily’s husband, Emily notices that everyone she meets is kind of infatuated with Stella. It’s just who she is.

Emily and Stella loll around the camp, swimming, watching movies, and soaking up the sun but as a reader you just know that this idyllic summer must end eventually, and it does. I loved the easiness of this novel. I loved the complexities of female friendships displayed here and I liked how the author explored things without making you feel too strongly about any one thing.

Plus, the setting was great. The lake and the sunlight filtering through the trees. It’s all so palpable. I really enjoyed The Summer Demands but it definitely falls into the “quiet novel” category which I enjoy very much.

Source: Review copy provided by the publisher.
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

Daisy Jones & The Six
By Taylor Jenkins Reid
Ballantine Books, 9781524798628, March 2019, 368pp.

The Short of It:

An accurate depiction of what fame can do to a person, to a band, to a family.

The Rest of It:

Daisy Jones & The Six has been everywhere. It was chosen for Reese Witherspoon’s book club Hello Sunshine and so many of my reader friends have read it…or tried to. Not everyone has loved it, which is the way it goes when a book hits the scene with so much hype.

I, however, loved it. I’ve not felt like this about a book in a long time.

The story is about the beginnings of a fictional rock band called The Six during the late 60’s, well into the 70’s. Headed up by Billy Dunne, a writer and singer with talent coming out of his pores, The Six clearly has a sound that the record industry immediately notices.

At the same time, Daisy Jones is this barefoot wisp of a thing. Young and strung-out on drugs, but possesses a voice and presence that is hard to ignore. Under the same record label as The Six, it’s only a matter of time before their manager tries to put the two of them together and their chemistry if off-the-charts. The crowd loves them.

What happens when you put two, larger-than-life people together and ask them to share the stage? What happens to the rest of the band? What happens to Billy’s relationship with his wife and kids? What happens to Daisy as she slowly sinks ever deeper into a cloud of drugs, desperately wanting what other people have?

Wow. Wow. Wow. The story started off slow but once I got into it, I could not turn the pages fast enough. Throughout the story there is this sense of doom that I could not shake. I had to know what it was.

The format did not bother me. It’s written like a script so it’s not surprising that it’s slated to be a TV series soon. Reid mentioned that Fleetwood Mac might have been the inspiration behind the book. I can totally see it. What I cannot stress enough is how the story made me feel. It contains that classic mix of love and pain and recklessness and danger. Anyone who has experienced complicated love or love that makes you question everything you know to be true will get totally caught-up in this story. You don’t even have to love rock and roll to get it.

This is a book you must experience for yourself. Read it. Feel it. That’s all I can say about it. Readers have said the audio book is fabulous so if you don’t like the script format perhaps that’s the way to go.

Source: Purchased
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

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