Feb. 19: Still Summer

I don’t blog about every book I read, but sometimes I just have to talk about books after I’ve finished them. Tonight I finished reading Still Summer, by Jacquelyn Mitchard. This was my first Mitchard novel. For some reason I think of her books as a little more mainstream than I typically enjoy, which might be unfair, but I guess I’ve avoided them. I’ve got a couple other books of hers that have been given or loaned to me, and they’ve been collecting dust on my bookshelves for years. The only reason I have Still Summer is because my mom bought it last week and as soon as we left Barnes & Noble she realized she’d already read it so she handed it to me. (Pssst… I think she just didn’t want to carry it around the mall.)

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Mitchard is a fine writer—there were just a few times the flow seemed awkward, and it was most often because she used an odd/archaic word where a perfectly common one would have worked. It bugs me when authors do that very much because it’s easy to imagine them writing with a thesaurus in their lap, just to sound more vocabularily impressive than they are. How d’ya like that word? VOCABULARILY. It’s totally real.

A description from Publishers Weekly:

Bestselling Mitchard offers the harrowing tale of four women lost at sea and pitted against nature and a cohort of contemporary pirates. Tracy, Holly and Olivia have known each other since high school, when they were glamorous, popular troublemakers. Twenty-five years after graduation, the three women, plus Tracy's 19-year-old daughter, Camille, set out on a "reading, sunning, gossiping" trip aboard a luxe sailboat helmed by a two-man crew. But a storm leaves the women adrift with no sail or engine and their co-captains gone overboard. With limited sailing experience, failing radio equipment and a rapidly diminishing cache of food and water, the women are vulnerable to the worst threats the Caribbean can offer—the elements, sharks and, most troublesome, pirates. This fast-paced novel borrows qualities from several genres—suspense, survival epic, coming-of-age—and mostly succeeds in melding the better aspects of each, though Mitchard has a surer hand in creating women characters than men. Mitchard's fans will appreciate this high-stakes adventure.

I thought the story was well-woven and could easily see it made into a movie. It has “high seas thriller” written all over it, in fact. I found it hard to put down, so I made my kids skip dinner tonight. (What? They can eat tomorrow, when Mommy’s not reading.) Characters were well-developed, and the dialogue felt real. Those are two things I appreciate about authors’ efforts.

In many ways, the story could be described as Deliverance But With Women and In The Caribbean. Squealing like a pig was kept to a minimum, but there were definitely villains and heroes. The women’s survival instinct was strong and probably quite realistic. In a team-building exercise at work many years ago, we had to get ourselves rescued after a shipwreck, and my team died on the deserted island. You might want to make a note to yourself right now: never take Jen on a three-hour tour. ♫ A three-hour tour. ♪♫ I’ll be like Ginger; I’ll have a different outfit for every day but I won’t know the first thing about making a radio out of a coconut.

Still Summer isn’t the best or most fascinating book I’ve ever read, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to. I was also glad to find that Jacquelyn Mitchard’s writing style isn’t awful, and I plan to un-shun more of her books in the future. Just don’t try to get me to read Deep End of the Ocean. Child abduction? No way. Never.