| The movement began in Wisconsin and has stretched across the world |
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| Three Recommendations to Bring Summer Alive |
In the depths of yet another soul-crushing blizzard this past February, I knelt in front of the bookshelf that holds my travel guides and flipped through pages that described sun-splashed islands in the Mediterranean, the warm plains of Patagonia, the baked desert of Chile’s Atacama. I needed instant immersion in “anywhere else”!
But travel-guide reading will only take you so far, so I’ve got two novels and a delicious poem that will envelop us in the heady richness of summer.
The first is Ian McEwan’s “Atonement.” I’ve read this novel twice and just watched the rather good movie made from the book. It opens on a torrid summer day in 1930s England, when what a young girl thinks she’s witnessed will change her life — and the lives of the people she’s spying on — forever.
McEwan gives us a fair measure of backstory and countryside landscape. Just what I’m in the mood for in my summer reading! But he also builds the most twisted of moral dilemmas almost from the beginning.
My second “high summer” novel is “Bitter Orange” by Claire Fuller, one of NPR’s Best Books of 2018. This brings us back to the English countryside, to a Wuthering Heights kind of dilapidated mansion, and another young woman who is spying on people and misunderstanding what she’s seeing. I like what reviewer Jean Zimmerman said about this story: “We are in 'Turn of the Screw' territory here, unsure whether what happens is real or imagined, true or false, light or dark.”
And here’s the cherry on top of your summer sundae: Carmen Giménez Smith’s poem, “Photo of a Girl on a Beach.” It begins: “Once when I was harmless and didn’t know any better, a mirror to the front of me, an ocean behind… .”
— Kerri Miller |
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