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A review by alisarae
Summer Crossing by Truman Capote
I was so excited for this book when I started it. The beginning is so full of potential with beautiful character setup, but then it peeters out to a fizzle (in terms of creativity with the plot).
Grady is a rich rebel in jazz era New York. When her parents leave for the summer, she is left alone to finally get away with all of her wild teenage plans. It’s a literal car wreck.
While Grady’s character motivations are explained in the beginning as being the opposite of her mother and perfect-daughter older sister, it seems that she has something else going on that is never fully explained. Why is she so fixated on sexually manipulating men? The book says that she had the popularity and opportunity to sexually manipulate women, but neither her own popularity nor female relationships interested her. Why is she so reckless? It seems that every safety lock along the way serves to only make her choose even worse decisions. There are multiple points that I wish the internal dialogue of the character had been developed or at least that more time would have been spared to dwell on the implications for the characters, but this is only a novella. If I had been the editor, I would have pushed it to be a full length novel.
Edit: just read some other reviews that said this was never meant to be published. So there’s that.
Grady is a rich rebel in jazz era New York. When her parents leave for the summer, she is left alone to finally get away with all of her wild teenage plans. It’s a literal car wreck.
While Grady’s character motivations are explained in the beginning as being the opposite of her mother and perfect-daughter older sister, it seems that she has something else going on that is never fully explained. Why is she so fixated on sexually manipulating men? The book says that she had the popularity and opportunity to sexually manipulate women, but neither her own popularity nor female relationships interested her. Why is she so reckless? It seems that every safety lock along the way serves to only make her choose even worse decisions. There are multiple points that I wish the internal dialogue of the character had been developed or at least that more time would have been spared to dwell on the implications for the characters, but this is only a novella. If I had been the editor, I would have pushed it to be a full length novel.
Edit: just read some other reviews that said this was never meant to be published. So there’s that.