Summer Girl - Hardcover

Moulton, Deborah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803711530 ISBN 13: 9780803711532

Publisher: Dial, 1992

Synopsis

Sent to live with her father because of her mother's serious illness, thirteen-year-old Tommy journeys from resentment to understanding of the man she has not seen since her parent's divorce many years ago.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

What looks like another kid-with-problem-parents-goes-through- summer-of-change book turns out to be a sensitive picture of a girl countering disruption and death with personal growth. While her mother is dying of cancer, Tommy is sent to stay with her estranged father (Jud) in Maine. Prickly, unfriendly, and critical, Tommy resents her obnoxious aunt (a nurse, who banished her), the harbor town, and Jud, whose home is an untidy shambles and whom she blames for her parents' split. Still, she cleans up the house, accepts a job, and tries to sound upbeat in letters home. In return, her mother writes about her marriage and Tommy's birth, in installments that parallel the present: she too was a ``summer girl'' who got involved with a ``local.'' There the semblance ends: dumping Tommy's father for another man, her mother left Jud so stricken that he barely survived. Though some of the events here are melodramatic, their handling is subtle. Assimilating her mother's revelations and learning to cope with her new life, Tommy grows in understanding; while her immediate reaction to the past's betrayals is never explicitly portrayed, her rages against her father are believable, as are his fumbling but ultimately successful efforts to make a home for the 13-year-old daughter he has always loved from afar. Like Jean Thesman's novels, an engrossing read that offers strong characters and real values. (Fiction. 10-14) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

Grade 6-9-- It's been 10 years since 13-year-old Tommy has seen her father, and during that time resentment of him burgeons. But now that her mother is dying, Tommy is sent to spend the summer with him in a small seaside town where he lives a lonely life in dusty, messy squalor. Reclusive and awkward, Jud finds it as hard to have a daughter around as she finds it to be with this uncommunicative, strange man. Angry that she's not with her mother, she resists his quiet attempts to win her friendship, if not her love. The series of letters between Tommy and her mother changes the novel's focus to the story of her parents' romance, marriage, and breakup. As her mother recalls the past, Tommy's gradual understanding of them moves her closer to her father, and she begins to make a life for herself with him. At last, in a final bedside death scene, the three come together in a satisfying, if trite, moment of forgiveness and love. The book is well written, with a lot to say, but the change in point of view from the protagonist to her parents is not likely to appeal to readers of Tommy's age, and she is too young for older readers to identify with. However, the double-whammy of the mother's dying and the failed romance should satisfy young readers who like books to cry over. --Marjorie Lewis, Scarsdale Junior High School, NY
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dial
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0803711530
• ISBN 13: 9780803711532
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 133