Summer Reading is the story of three women whose disparate lives intersect in the Hamptons. Lissy Snyder, a beautiful emotionally needy newlywed, is the unwilling stepmother of her husband's hostile children. Her eavesdropping housecleaner, Michelle, a local, is resentful of the moneyed arrogance of the vacationing "invaders" and can't get a commitment from her fisherman boyfriend. Solitary, bookish Angela Graves, leader of The Page Turners, a book group attended by wealthy young summer residents, harbors the shameful memory of a disastrous affair she had long ago. Over the summer, Angela encourages her book group to identify with the heroines of novels by Trollope, Flaubert and Charlotte BrontÎ. But can reading, as she proposes, really influence the choices people make and even change the course of their lives?
Anyone who's ever lived in the New York area knows only too well the hoity-toity world of women who summer in the Hamptons. In this memorable little tour de force, Wolitzer fleshes them out, and Isabel Keating gives each one a distinctive voice, almost, but not quite, ironic. The story focuses on three women whose paths cross one summer--Lissy, a trophy second wife; Michelle, Lissy's summer maid; and Angela, a retired college professor who agrees to lead a book group. The setting is peopled with tony summer ladies, husbands who show up on Friday nights, blue-collar locals, and rich, bored children. As Angela tries to inspire the book group to embrace the benefits of reading "great books" and Lissy struggles with her dyslexia as she tries to read them, the lives of the main characters take on the very crises and high emotion dramatized in literature. What a delight! R.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
The Philadelphia Inquirer on The Doctor's Daughter...
Packs an emotional wallop... Wolitzer's evocation of Alice's first-person narration is nuanced, sensitive, keenly observant, her prose measured, polished, nimble.
About the Author
Hilma Wolitzer is the author of several novels, including Hearts, Ending, and Tunnel of Love. She is a recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award. She has taught at the University of Iowa, New York University, and Columbia University. She lives in New York City.
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