FAREWELL SUMMER - Hardcover

SANTMYER, HELEN HOOVEN

3.33

54 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814208681 ISBN 13: 9780814208687

Publisher: Ohio State University Press, 2001

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It's a long, languorous, country summer in a small Ohio town. After many years spent away as a scholar and writer, Elizabeth Lane has returned to the setting of her most poignant childhood memories, a town steeped in her family's long history. She comes to Sunbury to work on a book but finds she is haunted by one memory in particular. It was 1905, she was eleven and in love with her cousin, Steve, painfully watching his ill-fated romance with the beautiful Damaris. Looking back, Elizabeth discovers a world of feelings that she knows belong more to adulthood than childhood, and as she sees the tragic, doomed love of Steve and Damaris, she wishes she could be a child forever.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Written shortly before the bestselling . . . And Ladies of the Club, this slim novel tells, in the leisurely, old-fashioned style that has endeared Santmyer to many readers, about an ill-fated love affair that occurred in the town of Sunbury, Ohio, one summer, long ago. Damaris, a high-spirited beauty, returns home from a convent school and announces she wants to become a nun, an unthinkable idea to her Dutch Presbyterian family. Her cousin Steve, a dreamy young man who yearns to be a poet, comes to Sunbury after his father's death to seek his fortune. The inevitable happens. The two young people, with some encouragement from Damaris's grandfather, begin a flirtation. Steve falls hard, but is caught short by Damaris's shrewd assessment of their personalities: "We need anchors. Together we'd be driftwood." The story leads to an inevitable, disastrous conclusion. This slight, melancholic tale is more successful than Herbs and Apples, less so, of course, than Santmyer's life work ". . . And Ladies." The author shines in her loving recollections of turn-of-the-century Ohio and her exploration of the ties that bindand breakfamilies.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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