This One Summer
Sassymonkey mentioned This One Summer to me recently on Convo and I decided I needed to read it. Though I didn’t love Skim as much as most people did, I liked it quite a lot and wanted to see how this one compared.
I liked this one even more (though based on some Good Reads reviews I read, I might be alone.)
I liked this one for the reasons that most people did not.
Growing up is hard. Growing up as a girl is really hard. And when your parents are dealing with their own shit, everything is even harder and weirder and confusing.
And you know what? Kids don’t always learn (immediately) from their experiences. I liked that Rose didn’t immediately and obviously learn the hard lessons. I suspect that what she went through that one summer will stay with her and help her become whoever it is she becomes. Kids don’t immediately grok why slut-shaming is wrong just because a friend says it’s wrong. That kind of thing takes time. Kids don’t immediately grasp the complexities of other people’s relationships and their opinions are formed around what they know of the world, so it made perfect sense that Rose might not see things from Jane’s point of view and she certainly would not have understood her mother or her father.
It was just one summer. Kids don’t evolve into complete and wonderfully deep human beings in just one summer. That was the truth, for me, of this book.
Oh yea, the drawings were wonderful — as you’d expect.