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A review by mcckev
Summerlong by Dean Bakopoulos
2.0
This book is the love child of Richard Ford’s Independence Day and the movie Winter Passing. I hated the Ford novel (but have to give it another shot one of these days since Ford’s short stories are excellent), loved the movie and my feelings for Summerlong fall somewhere in the middle (but much closer to the Independence Day side of the scale).
The children were poorly written. They were only in the novel to advance the plot/make Claire and Don an average middle aged-couple. Same thing with the characters’ employment status. Nobody in the novel had a (real) job, but they still managed to smoke a lot of weed (maybe Ruth was everybody’s sugar daddy). Don’s a realtor, or was a realtor (one that was apparently terrible at selling houses and spent all his money on cheesy advertisements?), before he went bankrupt. Everybody else seemed to be independently wealthy.
So many coincidences. Ruth was there to spout off nuggets of wisdom and, I am guessing, add “depth” to the novel.
I don’t have to like all the characters in a novel, but I should at least care about what happens to the main ones. By the end of Summerlong I found myself wishing all the adult characters would just drown themselves in Lake Superior and be done with it. The tv-watching-children probably wouldn’t even notice until a couple days later when they ran out of pizza.
The children were poorly written. They were only in the novel to advance the plot/make Claire and Don an average middle aged-couple. Same thing with the characters’ employment status. Nobody in the novel had a (real) job, but they still managed to smoke a lot of weed (maybe Ruth was everybody’s sugar daddy). Don’s a realtor, or was a realtor (one that was apparently terrible at selling houses and spent all his money on cheesy advertisements?), before he went bankrupt. Everybody else seemed to be independently wealthy.
So many coincidences. Ruth was there to spout off nuggets of wisdom and, I am guessing, add “depth” to the novel.
I don’t have to like all the characters in a novel, but I should at least care about what happens to the main ones. By the end of Summerlong I found myself wishing all the adult characters would just drown themselves in Lake Superior and be done with it. The tv-watching-children probably wouldn’t even notice until a couple days later when they ran out of pizza.