MY FATHER’S SUMMERS

The power of this bittersweet, small volume lies in its precise limning of how a child perceives and experiences the emotions of separation, divorce, and stepfamilies. Appelt only gives us her side, but it is a pure and vivid one: her dad writing letters from Arabia, where he has worked for years; her dad coming home, but to another family, not hers with her mother and her sisters. The brief vignettes illuminate like lightning in a darkened room—not quite poetry, but too compressed to be prose, exactly. She spins her sentences from summers at her father’s house to life at her mother’s; from the time “before” when they believed he would come home, to the remembered present, when they knew he wouldn’t. Most of this takes place during the 1960s, and historical and musical events track the period. Family photographs exactly reflect the passionate resonance of the text. (Memoir. YA)