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Summer's End by Kathleen Gilles Seidel
 | Summer's End Kathleen Gilles Seidel Date: 1999-06 — Book Rating: |
I reread this gem over the weekend. It seemed apropos as I had just been at the cottage with my own family. What a wonderful writer Seidel is. She has such an understanding of people and why they do the things they do.
The story line is simple. Gwen Wells and Hal Legend are both widowed with adult children. When they decide to get married, their families struggle with the changes that occur in group family dynamic. Hal's daughter Phoebe idolized her mother and grieved deeply when she died. When Hal remarries less than two years after Eleanor's death, Phoebe feels more than a little betrayed on behalf of her mother. Her sister Amy, an olympic gold medalist for women's figure skating, feels differently, however. Amy loved Eleanor, but always felt like she didn't measure up. She has been very successful, but not in the intellectual ways Eleanor and Hal were more familiar with.
Gwen's son Jack takes his mother's marriage much better. He had a rocky relationship with his dad, an admiral in the navy, and so laid back Hal looks pretty good in comparison. He doesn't much like Hal's kids, though. All of this complicated emotion comes to a head when both sides of this new marriage come to spend the summer at the Legend cottage in upper Minnesota.
This book is entirely character driven; there is no plot to speak of. It all about how each character feels about their family members and how they negotiate their shifting roles in the greater family. What's so good about it is that these people all seem so real, like people I actually know. Seidel clearly understands how birth order affects personality and respects the different ways people learn and how it affects their gifts and talents. No one is a villain, though there are a few truly messed up individuals in the lot, and the others learn how to just deal with things that aren't going to change. How like real life this is!
When I interviewed Seidel last year she mentioned that she wasn't writing romance anymore, and it made me sad to hear that. But when I think further on it I realize that her strength has never been in portraying intense romantic emotion, but in showing how people (man, woman, young, old) relate to each other. In Summer's End the most interesting emotions aren't really Amy's or Jack's, at least not their emotions about each other. Those are fairly straightforward. It's the messy stuff Amy feels about her parents' more overt support of Phoebe and Ian and how Phoebe feels about her mom's death. And the emotional moments between Phoebe's and Ian's families. It's really fascinating to read about how the rest of the Legend family feels that Ian is not properly parenting his kids. And how Ian's wife, Maggie, favors her first child Maggie and lets her get away with all kinds of crap because she's sensitive about the fact that Maggie was adopted by Ian and not his biological child.
Seidel's next project (for St. Martin's) is apparently due August 1st. Recently she had this to say about it:
As you can probably tell, I no longer have very much to say about two twenty- (or even thirty-) somethings falling in love. I'm still wildly interested in how people love one another, but I'm more interested in families and friendships. Certainly in my last few books, the courtship plot isn't as interesting as the other relationships. SInce the books were published as romances without strong romances at their core, my numbers aren't very good.
So in the last two years I have had three false starts as I've figured out what kind of books that I could write. I kept starting and (to my agent's dismay) stopping a book about women's friendships. I finally realized that the many of the usual "four friends" books are subtly and perhaps unknowingly anti-family. In order to emphasize the importance of the friendships, the author downplays the importance of the characters' families. Heaven knows that my own friends seem to know more (and care more!) about my daily life than do my husband and children, but when the cannons start firing, I'll want to have the four Seidels in the same muddy trench together. So sorting out the interplay between friend and family made the book feel possible. The four women all have young teen-aged daughters; they met each other through the girls, they all drive carpools together, the women have probably invested too much of themselves in their daughters' lives. What happens when the girls start to fight? What does that do to the mothers' friendships?
You know, I am not a big fan of the "four friends" books. I thought it's because I have had bad luck with girl groups in my life, but I think Seidel is on to something here. When this book comes out, I'll be there with bells on.