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A review by tympestbooks
The Summer We Buried by Jody Gehrman
2.0
There was a summer where Tansy was drawn in by the brightness and energy and sharp-edged determination of one of her fellow summer workers at a spa, Selene. A woman with a million stories of the life she used to live, fantastic and fascinating and intoxicating. But even the greatest of summers end and this one ended with a murder that Selene convinced her they needed to cover up, and the guilt drove her as far away as she could get. Twenty years later, Selene has returned to demand Tansy help her look into her daughter relationship, insisting that Jupiter’s boyfriend is abusive and that Tansy owes her and digging into her life both to make sure she does as asked and, possibly, in a desperate bid to mend a friendship lost. Can Tansy work around her former friend’s demands and keep her professional integrity? Does she want to?
Jody Gehrman’s The Summer We Buried just doesn’t work for me on any level. It was marketed as a thriller but then mostly dealt with the protagonist’s personal trauma and drama as her literally crazy former best friend comes back into her life nearly twenty years later to demand she help break up Selene’s daughter’s relationship or else. And also Selene’s younger brother is hot and that will take up so much page space.
The antagonist really seems to be Selene and her personality disorder more than the daughter’s abusive boyfriend or the situation Tansy has found herself in in her life. Selene marches in and makes demands, holding the events of a summer long ago over protagonist’s head as a threat, trying to make Tansy do her bidding despite her professional duties to her patients. She goes to Tansy’s house with no warning or indication that she should know where Tansy lives to push her to do the thing. She’s clearly a character who needs serious help, but then Tansy just goes along with it, telling herself that if she does a little of what Selene wants then she can dig her feet in later and not go all the way. She even convinces Selene’s younger brother the professor/government agent/ person who lived with this shit for years of this path. It’s frustrating and sad rather than thrilling.
And the romance with the younger brother isn’t any better. It feels too fast, too included because the author needed to fill page space, too much like the ending had been set already and it needed to be there for that ending to work. It does not even feel like it has a solid foundation, Tansy never really explains what Selene has on her because ‘a man just couldn’t understand’ and goes on to keep hiding more and more from him as the plot continues. It’s the kind of thing that leaves me feeling like the ending should have been the half way point of the story, with the next half dedicated to the whole house of cards falling in around everyone’s heads.
That ending is a fair chunk of my frustration too. With Selene’s mental health issues being such a major part of what ties everything together and drags the various characters into place, the ending is simultaneously the only way the book could have ended and also feels totally unearned. The pathos for Selene could have been there, should have been there, but a late story character revelation tears a good chunk of it away. I know nothing about borderline personality disorder or how it effects people who have it, Selene could easily be an accurate bad case scenario for it and I would not know, but it feels like a depiction of refusing to deal with their mental illness and forcing someone else to fix the problem they caused. Selene is gone and Tansy is left holding everything together for her and cleaning up the mess. And I hate it.
Which really is the problem here, The Summer We Buried could be the most sensitive portrayal of someone dealing with a friend having bpd in recent writing, but it just does not work for me personally. It feels overly dramatized, very made for TV movie, in its plot and character work. I would probably be kinder to it without the suddenly aggressively hetero romance and the weird gender essentialist reason for bad communication, but I cannot know how much kinder I would be.
Which is a real shame because there are several moments where the author will find space for a lush description of a landscape or will pull Tansy away from the Selene drama and let her interact with a different set of characters, allowing for moments of warmth and camaraderie that feel so much more real and solid than any of the rest of the book. It is clear that Gherman has skill as an author, but I do not know that she is an author for me. I give The Summer We Buried a two out of five. I think I would try Gherman’s writing again, but in a different genre.
This book was provided to me through netGalley for honest review. Review was previously posted at https://tympestbooks.wordpress.com/2022/08/24/the-summer-we-buried/
Jody Gehrman’s The Summer We Buried just doesn’t work for me on any level. It was marketed as a thriller but then mostly dealt with the protagonist’s personal trauma and drama as her literally crazy former best friend comes back into her life nearly twenty years later to demand she help break up Selene’s daughter’s relationship or else. And also Selene’s younger brother is hot and that will take up so much page space.
The antagonist really seems to be Selene and her personality disorder more than the daughter’s abusive boyfriend or the situation Tansy has found herself in in her life. Selene marches in and makes demands, holding the events of a summer long ago over protagonist’s head as a threat, trying to make Tansy do her bidding despite her professional duties to her patients. She goes to Tansy’s house with no warning or indication that she should know where Tansy lives to push her to do the thing. She’s clearly a character who needs serious help, but then Tansy just goes along with it, telling herself that if she does a little of what Selene wants then she can dig her feet in later and not go all the way. She even convinces Selene’s younger brother the professor/government agent/ person who lived with this shit for years of this path. It’s frustrating and sad rather than thrilling.
And the romance with the younger brother isn’t any better. It feels too fast, too included because the author needed to fill page space, too much like the ending had been set already and it needed to be there for that ending to work. It does not even feel like it has a solid foundation, Tansy never really explains what Selene has on her because ‘a man just couldn’t understand’ and goes on to keep hiding more and more from him as the plot continues. It’s the kind of thing that leaves me feeling like the ending should have been the half way point of the story, with the next half dedicated to the whole house of cards falling in around everyone’s heads.
That ending is a fair chunk of my frustration too. With Selene’s mental health issues being such a major part of what ties everything together and drags the various characters into place, the ending is simultaneously the only way the book could have ended and also feels totally unearned. The pathos for Selene could have been there, should have been there, but a late story character revelation tears a good chunk of it away. I know nothing about borderline personality disorder or how it effects people who have it, Selene could easily be an accurate bad case scenario for it and I would not know, but it feels like a depiction of refusing to deal with their mental illness and forcing someone else to fix the problem they caused. Selene is gone and Tansy is left holding everything together for her and cleaning up the mess. And I hate it.
Which really is the problem here, The Summer We Buried could be the most sensitive portrayal of someone dealing with a friend having bpd in recent writing, but it just does not work for me personally. It feels overly dramatized, very made for TV movie, in its plot and character work. I would probably be kinder to it without the suddenly aggressively hetero romance and the weird gender essentialist reason for bad communication, but I cannot know how much kinder I would be.
Which is a real shame because there are several moments where the author will find space for a lush description of a landscape or will pull Tansy away from the Selene drama and let her interact with a different set of characters, allowing for moments of warmth and camaraderie that feel so much more real and solid than any of the rest of the book. It is clear that Gherman has skill as an author, but I do not know that she is an author for me. I give The Summer We Buried a two out of five. I think I would try Gherman’s writing again, but in a different genre.
This book was provided to me through netGalley for honest review. Review was previously posted at https://tympestbooks.wordpress.com/2022/08/24/the-summer-we-buried/