My Father's Summers: A Daughter's Memoir
Grade 7 Up–Nostalgia and longing waft through this spare collection of poetic vignettes. The selections capture a girl's life in the late 1960s and early '70s pitted by the pungent absence of her father, who is working for long stints in Arabia. He returns, but there's the larger distance of a dissolving marriage and establishment of a new family. Lyrical prose probes the heart, as in "Long Division": "...Then there were the three of us, sisters. All loving him. But there was a remainder. My mother still loved him too." Throughout the confusion of adult discord, there's a constant, the tight ties between a daughter and her father. The uplifting joys of a happy girlhood and the conflicting slide of loss are well balanced. Appelt uses historical events and black-and-white family photos to anchor the emotional timbre of her youth, and the nonlinear selections roll past like snapshots from a scrapbook. Unfolding in Houston, TX, this past might have been "anywhere USA." Appelt bridges the continent and the baby-boomer generation with heartfelt reflections. The question is whether today's readers will understand the fluid connection of these seemingly disjointed images. This may be one of those YA treasures especially suited for adults.–Alison Follos, North Country School, Lake Placid, NYCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.