The Mending Summer

The Mending Summer by Ali Standish, 2021

Recommended for grades 4-8; Fantasy, magical realism

Brief Review:

Twelve-year-old Georgia figures that “some summers are meant to break your heart,” and this is clearly one of them. Instead of going to camp, she is spending the summer at her great aunt Marigold’s country home, largely due to her beloved father’s descent into alcoholism. But Georgia finds that she enjoys the change in scenery, especially after she befriends a girl named Angela and they discover a magical lake that can grant wishes. Unfortunately, as they soon discover, the lake can only grant wishes in that specific location; it can’t fix Georgia’s family back home. It does give them several exciting adventures before the fun is spoiled by Cole, a boy who is staying with Angela and has been spying on Georgia. Angela tells Georgia that Cole is “trouble” but won’t give details. To Georgia’s surprise, she actually likes talking to Cole. While Angela is optimistic and full of naive advice, Cole’s attitude is bleak but sympathetic. Meanwhile, Georgia slowly learns about Aunt Marigold’s past and discovers that her great aunt understands exactly what she’s going through. As in Standish’s previous books, this novel discusses sad but realistic topics through the eyes of an introspective protagonist in a beautifully atmospheric setting. Towards the end, some of the life lessons about friendship, familial loyalty, and real-life wishes come across as being somewhat pedantic, but overall, this is an interesting and suspenseful book that skillfully uses fantastical concepts to explore real-life issues. Recommended for summer vacation reading material.

Long Review:

This book has been on my radar for several months now because of its author. I’ve read three of her previous books, and each of them was one of my top couple favorite books of the year. In my personal opinion, this new book ranks fourth out of the four, but it’s still an interesting, insightful middle grade novel that is very likely to make my “Best of the Year” list.

Twelve-year-old Georgia figures that “some summers are meant to break your heart,” and this is clearly one of them. It’s bad enough that she’s missing out on summer camp this year, but worse than that, her beloved Daddy has been replaced by someone Georgia calls the “Shadow Man.” That is to say, the man who comes home late, drunk and angry and wobbly, isn’t really Daddy. Between Daddy’s alcoholism and Mama’s busy schedule as she works towards a biology degree, Mama decides that Georgia should spend most of the summer with her great aunt Marigold, only coming home for the weekends.

Life at Aunt Marigold’s house out in the country is completely different, and Georgia quickly comes to love it. She enjoys learning to cook and make pottery, and she likes chatting with Hank the handyman, but mostly, she loves spending her days exploring the woods with her new friend Angela. Together, they discover a magical lake that can grant wishes. Unfortunately, as they quickly discover, the magic is very limited in its scope. Georgia and Angela can only experience the effects of their wishes while they are physically at the lake; it can’t fix the problems in Georgia’s family back home. It does give them several exciting adventures before the fun is spoiled by Cole, a boy who is staying with Angela and has been spying on Georgia. Angela tells Georgia that Cole is “trouble” but won’t give details. To Georgia’s surprise, she actually likes talking to Cole. While Angela is optimistic and full of naive advice, Cole’s attitude is bleak but sympathetic.

Meanwhile, Georgia knows that Aunt Marigold is keeping secrets from her. Why is there a room in her house that’s kept locked? And whose is the small grave in the forest? Georgia assumes that the room and the grave belong to the same person, presumably a child. She later finds out that she was wrong about both these assumptions and that Aunt Marigold’s past has a lot more in common with her present family situation than she had thought. The truth all comes out after a climactic couple of scenes in which Georgia gets separated from Angela and Cole, realizes that they were just part of the magic of the lake all along, and arrives home just in time to save Aunt Marigold from a kitchen fire.

As in Standish’s previous books, this novel discusses sad but realistic topics through the eyes of an introspective protagonist in a beautifully atmospheric setting. Although Standish’s books tend to be realistic fiction with a hint of mystery or magic, this newest book does contain literal magic. However, (spoiler alert!) the hints that it may be a ghost story turn out to be red herrings. The Mending Summer explores themes of friendship, familial love and loyalty, the value of creativity, and what it takes to make a real-life wish come true. In later chapters, the book stresses that alcoholism is a disease and that Georgia (and any readers who are experiencing similar things) can still love her father even while resenting his actions and wanting to avoid him. Much emphasis is placed on the dichotomy between what a person can and can’t control in their own life. The last few chapters contained just a little too much introspection about life lessons learned for my taste and ended up sounding a little more pedantic than Standish’s previous books that I liked so much. However, as a whole, I thought this book was interesting, suspenseful, and well worth reading. Recommended for summer vacation reading material.

A Sitting in St. James

A Sitting in St. James by Rita Williams-Garcia, 2021

Recommended for grades 9 and up; historical fiction, LGBT

Brief Review:

Set on an antebellum Louisiana plantation, this novel follows various members of the Guilbert family through an eventful few weeks of social life, schemes, and a forbidden romance. Madame Sylvie, the family matriarch, aims to flaunt her background as a member of pre-Revolution French aristocracy by throwing a party and commissioning a painting she can’t afford. Her son Lucien wants to elevate the social status of his illegitimate, mixed-race daughter Rosalie, and he seeks to arrange a marriage for her despite Madame Sylvie’s refusal to acknowledge Rosalie as a member of the family. Lucien’s son Byron is trying to please his grandmother by securing an engagement with a girl from a neighboring plantation despite the fact that he is in a homosexual romance. And Jane Chatham, a rebellious teenager who is staying with the Guilberts in order to take lessons in proper social behavior from Madame Sylvie, just wants to ride her horse. The various subplots involving the white protagonists are interspersed with the stories of their slaves, many of whom have suffered rape, beatings, and the sudden disappearance of family members. Despite the book’s somewhat one-dimensional characters, readers with an interest in the time period or the history of Louisiana will enjoy this novel and probably learn quite a bit from it. Comparing and contrasting this book with Gone with the Wind, while taking into account when each of these books was written and how they were researched, would make an interesting academic exercise for young adult readers.

Long Review:

Madame Sylvie Guilbert, once a member of the pre-Revolution French aristocracy, is now an elderly widow running the Louisiana plantation that is technically owned by her son Lucien. Although the plantation is in trouble financially and Madame Sylvie is deeply humiliated by the fact that both her husband and son have had illegitimate, mixed-race children by slave women, she is determined to maintain and flaunt her noble background and maintain a high social status. This attitude of superiority influences all of her decisions, such as when she agrees to bring Jane Chatham, a rebellious teenager from a neighboring plantation, into her home to teach her proper feminine behavior, and when she decides to throw an expensive party while her grandson Byron’s friend from military school is visiting. She also is eager to make official the implied marriage agreement between Byron and Eugenie Duhon from a neighboring plantation.

What Madame Sylvie doesn’t realize is that Byron and his friend Robinson Pearce are not just friends. Although Byron is resigned that it is his duty and responsibility to marry a high-class woman of French ancestry, and although he is fond of Eugenie, it is Pearce whom he loves. Robinson Pearce is a northerner and finds the rigid social expectations of the South to be strange, but he knows as well as Byron does that their homosexual relationship must be kept a secret.

Meanwhile, Lucien has decided to bring his illegitimate daughter Rosalie back from the boarding school where she’d been sent mainly to keep her out of view of her grandmother. Rosalie is a “quadroon”, that is, one quarter Black and three quarters White. Although that means she counts as black and she is a slave owned by her father, her skin color and features would allow her to pass as white. In fact, she bears a close resemblance to her grandmother, who refuses to acknowledge her and doesn’t allow her inside the house. But behind Madame Sylvie’s back, Lucien is attempting to raise Rosalie to a higher social status. He wants to marry her off to a friend’s son who is mixed-race but free.

Another significant subplot, which gives rise to the title of the book, is Madame Sylvie’s insistence that she must have her portrait painted by the most respected painter with the clearest tie to French aristocracy that she can find. At the recommendation of Eugenie Duhon, she commissions Claude Le Brun, despite being unable to afford the portrait. When Le Brun arrives, though, he’s not what she had in mind. He is planning to go to a retreat where painters discuss new techniques, a concept which Madame finds horrifying. And he thinks that slaves would make good subjects for a painting. Worst of all, he demands that Madame’s personal maid Thisbe act as his assistant. Thisbe, named after Marie Antoinette’s dog, has been trained from childhood to be the epitome of subservience, and Madame Sylvie doesn’t want her getting any ideas by being exposed to other people.

The story focuses on the upper-class white characters, but there are also numerous slaves whose stories are told in bits and pieces over the course of the book. The author’s note at the end of the book specifies that this is deliberate. Most historical fiction about slavery focuses on the slaves and their perception of their owners, just as most books about the civil rights era or about racism in contemporary times focus on black protagonists and their experiences with racism. But Williams-Garcia has chosen in writing this book to present slavery from the perspective of the perpetrators, showing how entrenched they are in the assumption that black slaves are subhuman and how reliant they are on their slaves. Most of the white characters, Madame Sylvie in particular, are overly preoccupied with their own ulterior motives and schemes. Unfortunately, this results in some very one-dimensional characterization. Jane Chatham in particular is hard to like as a character because her only traits are her lack of feminine mannerisms, her confusion about social expectations, and affection for her horse and her deceased father. 

This book varies greatly from Williams-Garcia’s other works in its mature subject matter and its length and complexity. The antebellum plantation setting makes it somewhat reminiscent of Gone with the Wind, although it’s remarkable just how culturally different antebellum Louisiana was from Georgia. Readers with an interest in the time period or the history of Louisiana will enjoy this book and probably learn quite a bit from it. But those who aren’t already in the subject matter probably won’t find this book as appealing. Its length and enormous cast of characters will be daunting to reluctant teen readers, and its apparent attempt to be an LGBT love story doesn’t mesh with the other plotlines of the book. Although it’s being marketed as a YA novel, this book has at least as much appeal for adults as for teen audiences.