Book Review: A Summer To Die

There’s something very strange about reading Lois Lowry’s seminal teen novel forty years after it was first published. Even though I hadn’t actually read it (despite loving her other books) until now, I had picked up on various details via cultural osmosis – the older sister Molly who dies being the main one, of course, and then younger sister and narrator Meg’s learning to deal with this, helped by her newfound expression in photography.

But there’s much more than that in this, like the young couple Meg befriends who are shunned by many because they seem to be unmarried (in fact, the woman has simply kept her own name), or the strangeness for Meg of moving to this new house while her professor father completes his book.

And it seems a strange mix of very adult – some of the scenes with the pregnancy/delivery, for example – and very naïve – it is very clear to the reader that Molly is not well, even though Meg doesn’t seem to see it. There’s a distance here that feels odd for a work for young readers, as well as a historical distance that makes it feel very much from a different time (which of course 1977 is, but still).

I liked it very much but my heart belongs to Anastasia Krupnik or Natalie of Find A Stranger, Say Goodbye.