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A review by srash
The Myth of Perpetual Summer by Susan Crandall
1.0
I am baffled by all the good reviews this book has generated. I read it for a book club, and it was very popular with all the other participants. I found the characters to be flat, two-dimensional, and overly mannered, and the plot contrived and frequently implausible. The dialogue was especially hackneyed and overwrought. There is some good stuff buried in here about dysfunctional family dynamics, untreated mental illness, and generational trauma, and the writer is not a bad prose stylist, but I was not impressed.
An incredibly bitchy P.S.:
It drove me crazy in a very petty way that this book is set in the South and ostensibly told through a Southern character's POV and . . . the author seems to have just followed some random checklist of things to throw in to make it seem Southern rather than seeming to know anything about the region. The most egregious to me was the Mississippi-born and bred protagonist asking her Southern belle Granny if she wanted "sweet tea." I know other parts of the US are weirded out by the Southern fixation on sweet tea, but we don't find it weird. It's just tea! Everyone already knows it's sweet! If you need to clarify what kind of tea it is, it's iced versus hot, but nobody in their right mind drinks hot tea in Mississippi during the summer.
An incredibly bitchy P.S.:
It drove me crazy in a very petty way that this book is set in the South and ostensibly told through a Southern character's POV and . . . the author seems to have just followed some random checklist of things to throw in to make it seem Southern rather than seeming to know anything about the region. The most egregious to me was the Mississippi-born and bred protagonist asking her Southern belle Granny if she wanted "sweet tea." I know other parts of the US are weirded out by the Southern fixation on sweet tea, but we don't find it weird. It's just tea! Everyone already knows it's sweet! If you need to clarify what kind of tea it is, it's iced versus hot, but nobody in their right mind drinks hot tea in Mississippi during the summer.