With summer vacation looming on the horizon I have a Perfect beach read for the YA and more mature juvenile readers in your life, the ones who enjoy realism with just a touch of magic thrown in: Katrina Leno's Sometime in Summer.
Anna, Leno's protagonist, is sure she's having a major streak of bad luck. Her parents are separated. Although they haven't signed divorce papers she has heard a strange woman's voice in the background when she's called her father on the phone. Her mother will have to sell the family bookstore she's grown up in. And she misses the formerly best friend she had a falling out with. So she greets her mother's news that they'll be taking a long summer vacation all the way across the country in Rockport, Massachusetts in the cottage where her mom had spent her growing up summers with anxiety and sadness.
She falls in love with Rockport and the cottage. Her first night there after her jet lagged mother goes to sleep she goes out to explore and meets a boy and a girl her age who become her friends. But there's something a little off about them and at the same time they remind her of two people she knows.
What if she's somehow mastered the art of time travel? What if she can keep two people she loves from making a big mistake by nipping their romance in the bud?
For an engaging narrative that violated the laws of physics younger readers can't do better than Sometime in Summer.
On a purrrsonal note, my parents (or at least my mother) would have been much happier if they'd never married. But there's NO WAY I'd have gone back in time and stopped their marriage because then I'd never have been born and I love my life.
A great big shout out goes out to all the kids counting the days til summer vacation.
Jules Hathaway
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