Praise for Still Summer
Book Synopsis
Mitchard's Still Summer plunges into terror
By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY
Secure your life preserver. Tie yourself to the mast … Jacquelyn Mitchard is taking you on a thrill ride you won't forget.
Mitchard made her mark in the literary world in 1996 when The Deep 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 St. Thomas to Grenada.
Tracy, a high school gym teacher, has spent years worrying about whether she loves her adopted daughter, Cammie, as much as she loves Ted, her biological son. When 19-year-old drama queen Cammie gets dumped by her boyfriend, Tracy invites her along on the trip.
Holly is a nurse and mother of 12-year-old twin boys. She is devoted to them but knows deep down that she's just not built for the trials and tribulations of being a mother.
Olivia is recently widowed. While her friends have been raising their families in Illinois, she has been living the life of a wealthy contessa in Europe.
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.
The Boston Globe
by Diane White
Jacquelyn Mitchard's "Still Summer" is a three-hankie nail-biter. The story unfolds slowly, allowing readers to get to know all the characters, their strengths and their weaknesses, before the inevitable disaster strikes. Olivia, Tracy, Holly, and Janis, best friends in high school, plan to get together again 20 years later. Glamorous, wealthy Olivia, recently widowed, has invited her three friends to join her on a luxurious yacht, the Opus, in the Caribbean. When her husband's illness forces Janis to drop out, Tracy asks her 19-year-old daughter, Cammie, to join the party. The Opus has a hard-working two-man crew, owner Lennie, a seasoned seaman, and his friend Michel, a handsome young Canadian. There's tension among the women at the beginning of the cruise, much of it centering on Michel. Things go seriously awry when both Lennie and Michel vanish after an accident. Then a storm leaves the boat without power, sail, or communication. Worse is to come: thirst, hunger, pirate s bent on rape and murder. As if that's not enough, there's a lot of bitchy backbiting among the women, who have nothing to lose but their lives. They let it all out, the accusations, the recriminations, the long-buried secrets. It would be unfair to potential readers to reveal more about the finely tuned plot. "Still Summer" is a rich concoction of tension, emotion, and violence, nicely stirred up by Mitchard, who means to scare readers, and move them too. She succeeds on both counts.
The Roanoke Times (Virginia)
By Cyndi Young-Preston
What a dirty trick to play on a book reviewer. There I was, all primed to read an entertaining little book about the reunion of four high school friends. Suddenly, there was intrigue ... danger ... terror. Oh. My. Gosh. I sat in my chair and read the entire book. (Thank goodness it wasn't a thousand pages.) Tracy, Janis, Olivia and Holly (known in Catholic high school as The Godmothers) wanted nothing more than a 10-day pleasure cruise on a chartered sailing vessel. Drinks ... sun ... water ... memories .... Their purpose was twofold: to rekindle old friendships, of course, and to comfort Olivia after the death of her Italian-count husband. At the last minute, Janis' husband required emergency surgery, so she couldn't go. Tracy invited her 19-year-old daughter, Camille, to go instead. Within days, their idyllic cruise morphed into the fires of hell.
Author Jacquelyn Mitchard is so clever, you feel every gut-wrenching second of it. And the title? Still Summer? The characters went through enough trauma for a lifetime; but when it was over, it was amazingly still August ... still summer. Wow.
Wantz Upon A Time.com
Gripping and Emotional
Reviewed by Deborah Rittle
…The reader will be pulled into this emotional tale of friendship, survival, and facing the truth about those you love. The author lets us experience the story from the viewpoint of each character, so we are privy to their inner thoughts and feelings as the drama of the story unfolds. This is a gripping, compelling tale which will take the reader on an emotional roller coaster. Be sure to have the tissues handy.
An idyllic trip interrupted inThe Deep End of the Ocean
By Melinda Bargreen
Special to The Seattle Times
Jacquelyn Mitchard became the very first Oprah's Book Club author with her gripping 1996 novel, The Deep End of the Ocean. Since then, Mitchard has produced a substantial and varied body of work (much of it built around family tragedies) that includes some hits and some near-misses. Somewhere between those two categories is her newest book, Still Summer, which Mitchard (in her blog) has called "a novel of survival and adventure." It's something of a departure from her usual style, though family relationships are still at the center of the narrative.
The plot feels a little formulaic: How many novels are based on a reunion of three or four close women companions from high school or college? Somehow you know from the earliest pages that this luxury sailboat cruise with 40ish friends Tracy, Holly and Olivia — the cool-girl "Godmothers" of their high school — is not going to come to a good end. You know this because Mitchard spends the opening chapters planting doubts and warnings as liberally as summertime geraniums in the front yard.
First off is a chapter in which three thuggish men are hurriedly repainting a stolen boat whose real owner they have just murdered. Not a good omen. Neither is the arrival of Olivia, the newly widowed wife of a wealthy Italian count, with her mountains of luggage and heaps of attitude. And when Tracy's contentious teenage daughter Cammie joins the trio as a last-minute replacement for a fourth friend (whose husband falls ill), we have a setup for plenty of conflict.
Added to this mix is the pair of men, middle-age Lenny (the captain) and younger Michel (his partner), who will be piloting the quartet of women in their luxurious trimaran. It's so well stocked with safety features, provisions, communications devices and emergency measures that you just know something is going to go terribly wrong.
And, of course, it does. Mitchard lays out the series of events leading to the crisis with a sure hand; it's easy to see how just a few crucial missteps, rather than one big overwhelming catastrophe, lead the boat and its occupants into trouble. As the crisis deepens, all of Mitchard's characters show what they're made of, and why they got that way. Of Olivia, for example, she writes: "If Olivia approached life with the greed and thoughtless hunger of a child, it was perhaps because all her adult life someone had always been there to guide and buffer her way. When she truly was a child, no one ever had."
Still Summer develops the characters in what amounts to a coming-of-age saga for each of them. Except for the emotionally and morally stunted Olivia, everyone (even one of the villainous pirates) has a greater understanding of life and their own limitations by the novel's end. And the lost-at-sea sequences have such oppressive power that you shouldn't be surprised if you feel a bit itchy for a while about stepping onto anything that floats, from the Washington State Ferries to the Queen Mary.
Melinda Bargreen is the classical music critic for The Seattle Times.
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