Showing results for "The Summer Daughter" in Coming of Age

Each year, the start of summer brings bustle and much-needed tourist dollars to the little town of Albany Beach, Delaware. For Natalie Sullivan, this season is proving more stressful than others. Their two children are thriving, but she’s experiencing pangs of loss at the end of her childbearing years. When sixteen-year-old McKenzie starts gushing about Bella, the new coworker at her summer job, Natalie suddenly finds her past and present in conflict. The more McKenzie talks about Bella, the more Natalie wonders: could Bella be her daughter?

It is June and our ten-year-old heroine is sad. She knows she will not get to leave her neighbourhood that summer, and the beach is far, far away. And that clouds like the bottom of a donkey's belly will hover all summer over her town, high among the volcanoes of northern Tenerife. But she has a best friend, Isora. And she likes everything about Isora. The colour of her arms and her hair and her eyes. Her handwriting and the way she writes the letter g with a huge tail. The way she calls her Shit because poop is a beautiful thing like the mist round the pines.

In the summer of 1973, teenage Ruth and her four friends are obsessed with pre-Raphaelite paintings and a little bit obsessed with each other. They spend the scorching summer days in the river by Ruth's grand family home, pretending to be the drowning Ophelia and recreating tableaus of other tragic mythical heroines. But by the end of the summer, real tragedy has found them. Twenty-four years later, Ruth is a wife and mother of three children and moves her family into her still-grand, but now somewhat dilapidated, childhood home following the death of her father.

Every June, the quiet beach town of Ogunquit is overtaken by wealthy families who hire local young women like Amy Latimer and Hayley Franklin to care for their children. Best friends since childhood, Amy and Hayley are eager to secure lucrative summer jobs. Amy wants to finance her upcoming move to Boston. Hayley hopes to earn enough money so that her mom can leave her abusive husband. But the passing weeks bring complications and revelations, altering friendships, testing the bond between mothers and daughters, and proving that the ripples from a single season can last forever...