A review by chericochran
The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson

3.0

I really wanted to love this novel, and kept waiting for it to just grab me and hold on tight. It never happened. I liked the author's style of writing and the alternating persons narrating. But there were so many unnecessary characters and rabbit-trail story lines that really went nowhere. Eventually I became very bogged down in all the details and the many, many words. It became tiring to try and sort through which characters and details were actually essential to the story and which were peripheral. Therefore, the novel just felt LONG, despite some enjoyable story lines. The Summer Before the War had the potential to be a really great novel, but I feel that it needed a lot more editing to achieve that goal.