by Maile Meloy
First published 2006
Abby Santerre is seven years old and stuck inside with chicken pox. The summer of 1979 burns hot around her family's house, but she can only watch from her window as her older siblings move freely through their world. The Santerres are a tight family, bound together by shared jokes and unspoken rules, but that summer something shifts. What begins as a childhood illness becomes the first crack in their foundation. The choices made during those sweltering weeks will ripple outward for decades, carrying the family across continents and through transformations none of them can foresee. Abby grows up watching her relatives navigate love affairs and betrayals, watching truth bend under the weight of desire and fear. The family she thought she knew reveals itself to be more fragile and more complicated than any child could understand. Meloy traces how a single summer can redirect entire lives, how the stories families tell themselves can both protect and deceive.
Genres: fiction, family, 20th-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family
Setting: United States
Period: 1979
325 pages · Paperback · John Murray