THE BIRDS OF SUMMER

Part melodrama, part family relationships, as another juvenile author addresses the problems of the children of the flower children. Summer McIntyre, a responsible tenth-grader, hates living on food stamps in a rundown trailer with her irresponsible hippy mother Oriole. She writes frequent unmailed letters to her father, a medical student who drifted through her mother's life the summer before Summer was born, and she is especially concerned about her little half-sister Sparrow, who seems to share their mother's easygoing nature. Now Sparrow's little friend Marina Fisher has been sent away for her asthma, though Sparrow insists that she is still around; the sisters have been barred from the farm of their neighbors, the Fishers; and Oriole has taken up with Angelo, a sinister stranger who's turned up at the Fisher farm—and who shoots the McIntyre dog later on. Gradually Summer learns that the Fishers are growing pot on their farm and that Angelo, a big-time crook and dealer, is holding little Marina hostage there to keep the family in line. By the time Oriole is arrested with the others in a raid on the farm, Summer has already arranged for her and Sparrow to move to Connecticut with a wealthy couple Summer has been doing housework for. But Summer has also been working for another couple, her sympathetic English teacher and his wife, and they help her to see that sending Sparrow may be beneficial but Summer's own loyalties and welfare are at home. There's also a budding romance between Summer and 16-year-old Nicky Fisher, which is pleasant but no more charged with life than the stock characterization of Oriole and Angelo. Still the shady doings on the farm provide the necessary suspense and Summer's troubled but sturdy presence invites empathy.