The Summer of my Fifteenth Year - Softcover

Geri Spencer Hunter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0984435050 ISBN 13: 9780984435050

Publisher: Blue Nile Press, 2015

Synopsis

Summer 1937 wasn t going to be a typical summer for Etta and her older sister, Becca because their older brother Charlie was returning home from college after two years. Papa has a new car, Becca s going away to college and Etta is turning 15. The threats of thunder storms which plague the mid-west have blown over, the air is filled with childhood fun until one fateful day when innocence is lost and the family, Mama, Papa, Charlie, Becca, and especially Etta, will never be the same. The Summer of my Fifteenth Year is a gripping, tightly written novel by Geri Spencer Hunter.

About this title

About the Author:

Geri Spencer Hunter is a native Iowan and a graduate of The University of Iowa College of Nursing (BSN, RN, PHN) Her writings have been published in numerous anthologies and her debut novel Polkadots was published in 1998. She is a wife, mother, grandmother and great grandmother. A retired Public Health Nurse, she lives in Sacramento, California with her husband, Hunter , a retired Mechanical Engineer.

Review:

Geri Spencer Hunter is a formidable storyteller who has crafted a genuine masterpiece with The Summer of My Fifteenth Year. When 86-year old Etta Mae Netter sits down to record her personal history, she releases a torrent of closely held family secrets that threaten to engulf her even after 71-years. Geri Hunter deftly draws us into the lives of the Netters, a well-to-do Black family living what appears to be an idyllic life in a small Iowa town during the tough times of the late 1930 s. She takes us back to that summer when fifteen-year-old Etta and the rest of her family awaited the return from college of their golden boy, Charleston Epstein Netter. With clean, clear prose, and unflinching gaze, Hunter brilliantly explores and ultimately exposes the secret born of that summer, the kind of secret that destroy girls but leave the men imposing them untouched. A secret that brings a whole family to its knees. A secret that nearly destroyed Etta, but left Charleston unscathed. Seventy-one-years later the pain that never left is finally exorcised by the telling. Terris McMahan Grimes, author of Smelling Herself: A Novel --back cover

The summer of my Fifteenth Year is hard to put down. Hunter s lilting literacy voice irresistibly carries the reader wherever she wants the reader to go. This poignant road once taken, like a scene that cannot be un-seen, cannot be un-traveled. Naoma Hardy, author --Inside pages

About this edition

• Publisher: Blue Nile Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0984435050
• ISBN 13: 9780984435050
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 209
• Editor: Kakwasi Somadhi
• Illustrator: Boze