Book Review: SUMMER'S EDGE

Title: Summer’s Edge

Author: Dana Mele

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Pages: 336

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

 

Spending a summer weekend at the Hartfords’ lake house has been an annual ritual for high schoolers and childhood friends, Emily Joiner; her best friend Chelsea; her other best friend, Kennedy Ellis Hartford, who is also Chelsea’s ex-girlfriend; Emily’s twin, Ryan, and Ryan’s best friend, Chase. But things have changed now.

Exactly a year after the lake house burned down, trapping Emily inside and killing her, her friends, Chelsea, Kennedy, Ryan, Chase, and Chase’s girlfriend of two years, Mila, have gathered together again. They have all been invited to the grand reopening of the lake house. The survivors will gather at the lake house on the anniversary of the tragedy of Emily’s death, after a year of no contact whatsoever with any of the others. They will spend one last weekend together before they all go off to college.

But the reunion is fraught with tension. They are all wary of each other, as they trade grievances and accusations. Chelsea finds the others, except Ryan, untrustworthy and their explanations and statements fraught with lies. And then Chelsea begins to hear Emily’s voice.

Everyone believes that Ryan wants revenge. But is the truth as simple as that?

 

The story is written in the first-person present tense PoV of Chelsea in the present known as the Summer of Egrets, the PoV of Kennedy two years ago in the Summer of Swallows, and Emily one year ago in the Summer of Swans. It was Emily who had the idea of naming the summers they spent at the lake house after birds. If the summer of egrets sounds a little too much like regrets, there’s a reason why.

Besides the three main PoVs, there are short chapters, the longest a mere 106 words, from an unknown PoV, alternating with every chapter in Chelsea’s account. This unknown PoV seems to have vengeance on their mind. All the action in the book, in each of the three PoVs, takes place on just one night, June 17, in different years in each of the accounts.  

The book is named after the Hartfords’ boat, Summer’s Edge, where some of the most critical action takes place.

 

WHAT I LIKED:

The author does a good job of creating an atmosphere of menace, especially in the scene with Chelsea in the attic and later in the cellar. The tarot cards, the accusations and counter accusations and the unsettling game of Truth or Dare, all add up to a sense of uneasy and brisk action in the story.

The characters are all friends, but there is enough relationship drama to create trouble for everyone. And when Chase introduces Mila to his friends for the very first time, the friendship dynamic gets all messed up. Mila is particularly annoying, as is often the case when an unknown person is initiated into a group where the dynamic is already settled and accepted.

Kennedy’s PoV introduces a paranormal element into the story.

The writing was nice. Here’s a sample of quotes I liked:

Love changes things. It redraws the map.

There are a lot of ways to be haunted. A place, a person, a memory.

No one who hates flowers haunts a garden.

In a hit and run, it isn’t the hit that’s the crime. It’s the run.

Parts of the truth as just as deceitful as blatant lies.

 

WHAT I DIDN’T:

Except for Ryan, I didn’t find any of the characters likeable. They claim that they would die for the others, but they would just as soon be ready to kill their friends too.  

The voices of the three PoVs sounded exactly alike. There was nothing by way of tone or vocabulary to let us know whose head we were in.

 

WHAT DIDN’T WORK FOR ME:

I found it odd that the author gave Emily and Ryan surnames, and Kennedy’s full name is repeated several times. But Chase, Mila and Chelsea don’t get a mention of their surnames even once. Also Chelsea and Chase sound too alike. The author should have come up with names that didn’t sound so similar.

 

ALL SAID AND DONE: The book is a delicious blend of the paranormal with the mundane reality of how mistakes have the capacity of destroying young lives and promising futures. 

 

Book Review: THE REAPER'S QUOTA

Title: The Reaper's Quota

Author: Sarah McKnight

Publisher: Indie

Pages: 199

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐

Grim Reaper #2497, or Steve as he likes to think of himself, is in big trouble. He is summoned by the Big Boss because he has not been meeting his quota of 30 Random Deaths each month. The Big Boss threatens him with dire consequences, complete annihilation, if he does not kill 30 random people over the next three days.

The premise seemed interesting at the beginning. People who have killed someone during their lifetimes become Grim Reapers after their death. But the premise was arbitrary; there was no explanation for why murderers were chosen to do this task. Steve doesn’t have an answer to the question, and thinking about it too much gives him a headache, he tells us. This lack of information causes us to lose the sense of novelty soon enough. The plot wasn’t particularly well thought out and the pace palled after a while.

There was a slapstick quality to the humour and the author steered clear of talking about deep philosophical questions or even themes like immortality, regret etc, which are inextricably bound with death.

An abysmal lack of diversity plagued the book. Considering that the Grim Reapers are supposed to work throughout the world, #2497 spends all his time killing people in America, mostly in Nevada, where he is based. Even the names of those who are selected to die are mostly of Anglo origin and parentage.

Granted the killings are supposed to be random, but the reasons should at least make sense. #2497 kills an African man because ‘Green is so not his colour’. Rude and racist.

Incidentally, Reapers International is headquartered in the US and operates as per US Central time.

Since each Random Death must take place more than a mile away from the Reaper’s previous killing, it gives #2497 space to hang around in Nevada. Very rarely does he venture outside the US.

Each random act of killing is preceded by a longish vignette on the basic nature and character of the chosen victim and how #2497 puts them to death in order to meet his quota. This is the only place where the author has put effort into researching various ways in which people have died. The methods of execution are not repeated, not once. #2497 is truly a death artist. He tells us that he likes to express his creativity through the manner in which he executes each Random Death.

Of course, the individual vignettes are interesting. But on the flip side, the exercise seems pointless because we are given details about people’s lives, causing us to see them as human and to relate with them, only for #2497 to sweep in and cut off their wicks.

Additionally, after a point, the story began to seem tiresome, because of the repetition involved. There were no real challenges that the protagonist faced, other than the threat of disappearance if he failed to meet his target. All he had to do, and even in the afterlife, despite being a skeleton, he was unmistakably a ‘he’, was kill people.

I found the whole deal about Heather, the only person to have had an encounter with a Grim Reaper and to have survived, a non-issue. There was a hint of romance that wasn’t called for. #2497’s final act was unconvincing. The twist at the end of the tale was totally unimpressive.

The author seems to have taken the idea of the Grim Reaper and run with it. There was no attempt to build an original world around it. The setting lacked lustre.

 

Spoiler: The scythe is supposed to cut off human wicks. How would it work on #2497, who is already a skeleton, and therefore has no human wick?

 

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)