The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me - Kingsbury
In Kingsbury's debut novel, she reminds all of us of the desire, the innocence and the price we pay for our first loves. With phrases that turn over in you mind like the heat rising off the Mississippi pavement, a story unravels about the love, secrets, redemption, loyalty and loss. Kingsbury juxstapositions the desperate sexual tensions of teenage love with misguided physicality and the limitations of societal acceptance on honest emotion.
While a bit explicit for my tastes, Kingsbury captivated me from the early pages with her writing style. With the rhythm and flavor of her phrases, the reader is drawn in to the deep south, to the intimacy of secrets, to inherent passions. Characters and a setting unfamiliar to my life's experience become seemingly familiar, as though the summer history of Haley, Fletcher, Riley and Crystal was my own.
There are some aspects of the novel that I felt were underexplored while the physicality of relationships seemed overdone. The end seemed an abrupt summary lacking the same flowing explanations we had experienced throughout. For the intensity with which the characters had come together, I struggled to understand how easily they seemed to accept loss.
While a bit explicit for my tastes, Kingsbury captivated me from the early pages with her writing style. With the rhythm and flavor of her phrases, the reader is drawn in to the deep south, to the intimacy of secrets, to inherent passions. Characters and a setting unfamiliar to my life's experience become seemingly familiar, as though the summer history of Haley, Fletcher, Riley and Crystal was my own.
There are some aspects of the novel that I felt were underexplored while the physicality of relationships seemed overdone. The end seemed an abrupt summary lacking the same flowing explanations we had experienced throughout. For the intensity with which the characters had come together, I struggled to understand how easily they seemed to accept loss.
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