Windchill Summer - Softcover

Norris Church Mailer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841151491 ISBN 13: 9781841151496

Publisher: Fourth Estate Limited, 2001

Synopsis

It is the start of a long, hot summer. Cherry and Baby are working at the pickle plant - everyone in Sweet Valley does this sooner or later - saving for the final year of their art degrees. As the machines hum and pulse with heat, the only relief is the wind-chill factor, the occasional breeze that evaporates the skin's film of sweat and draws the heat off for a few seconds. Cherry is over six foot, thin as a reed with pale skin and wild blonde hair. She has been brought up in the Holiness Church, as innocent and naive as it is possible to be. Baby is beautiful and petite, an Oriental jewel, sassy and damaged - and Cherry's protector. But nobody can protect Cherry from real life this summer and it begins when Carlene is dragged murdered from the lake. And when the boys come home from Vietnam, in an indefinable way the war comes back too, seeping into everyone's lives as the awful truth begins to unravel about who killed Carlene and why.

About this title

Review:

In Norris Church Mailer's debut, the muggy summer heat of Sweet Valley, Arkansas, mingles with an acrid smell of vinegar and onions at its pickling plant. An engaging, richly painted coming-of-age novel set in the late 1960s, Windchill Summer portrays the exploration and confusion of the times through a group of small-town friends caught up in a big-time web of intrigue and murder. Cherry Marshall has just turned 21 and is preparing for her final year of college when her sheltered existence is turned upside down by the murder of a high school friend. Until the discovery of Carlene's drowned body, life for Cherry had been an easy mix of university art studies, thrice-weekly meetings of the First Apostolic Holiness Church of God (part of the "real Don't religion" you would expect to find in an alcohol-dry Arkansas county), and summer jobs spent pickling cucumbers with her best friend, Baby, a Southern-assimilated Filipino, or "Filbilly." But Carlene's murder kicks off a summer of strange events and even stranger revelations. And as the craziness of the Vietnam War and the haziness of hippie-living begin to seep into Sweet Valley life, Cherry finds a whole new world taking shape around and within her: "I felt an excitement like the pioneers must have felt, knowing they were starting a whole new way of life." The territory she plows isn't quite so virgin, mind you, and many lives are wrecked, transformed, and renewed before the book's climax.

Mailer captures the tone of her young characters, and she writes revealingly of the pull and power of secrets and hypocrisy, of the few options and desperate choices of those caught on the underside of "proper" society. While Cherry tells her tale in the first-person voice, her friends' stories are relayed through Mailer's omniscient third-person voice. This double narrative is somewhat awkward, but the author's expressive style makes up for the oddity. She describes Carlene as a child who had been "prickly and serious, sturdy and pale, with freckles sprinkled on her skin like nutmeg on eggnog," and she tells the story of the local embalmer's wife who, before she died, had Polaroids taken of herself "lying down in various coffins and outfits until she decided on the one she liked. At the funeral, everyone said she had never looked better." Readers will inevitably look for the influence of the author's husband, but this half of the duo tells a captivating story in a voice all her own. --S. Ketchum

From the Back Cover:

"A CAPTIVATING READ . . . WINDCHILL SUMMER HAS ALL THE ELEMENTS. . . . A LITTLE MYSTERY, SOME HUMOR,
[AND] A DASH OF CHARM."
--The Denver Post

"WONDERFULLY SATISFYING AND APPEALING . . . It's the summer of 1969 in a place called Sweet Valley, Arkansas. Cherry and Baby [are] soon to be college seniors at the dinky university just a few miles away. . . . It all looks like a pleasant, predictable American life, but a long second look reveals that things aren't exactly what they seem to be. . . . [Mailer] loves her characters, and we fall in love with them, too."
--The Washington Post Book World

"IN GENTLY ROLLING SOUTHERN CADENCES, MAILER CAPTURES THE HORMONAL UPS AND DOWNS OF YOUNG WOMEN TEETERING ON THE VERGE OF ADULTHOOD."
--Entertainment Weekly

"THIS WINSOME COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL OFFERS MUCH TO MANY. Cherry, the narrator, is my kind of woman: good-looking, straight-talking, and able to describe what it's like to get amorous when you're wearing ten thousand petticoats. Most important, she's willing to decide for herself what's true."
--ELIZABETH BERG

"SMOOTHLY WRITTEN, SWEETLY SENTIMENTAL."
--The New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate Limited
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1841151491
• ISBN 13: 9781841151496
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1