Summers at Blue Lake - Rilegato

Althouse-Wood, Jill

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1565124960 ISBN 13: 9781565124967

Casa editrice: Algonquin Books, 2007

Riassunto

Returning to the quiet Pennsylvania lake town where she had spent her summers as a child to claim her grandmother's legacy, BJ, accompanied by her five-year-old son, hopes to put her life back together in the wake of her husband's abandonment, only to be confronted by the long-held secrets of her own past and by a reunion with the man who had been the object of her teenage crush.

Su questo libro

Dalla quarta di copertina:

My grandmothers were lesbians, a truth they neither exposed nor concealed. Every Sunday they took their place in the third pew, left of the aisle, at Lakeside Lutheran....Monday would come, and with it, a spiritual hangover. Once again, my grandmothers were acknowledged with a whisper, a nudge in the hardware store, a smile that lasted a second too long. There were other things, too—unspeakable other things that caused my mother to turn away from me when I asked her about her childhood....

The word was not forbidden in our house. I had heard it often and had practiced saying the beautiful syllables in my mirror. "Lez-be-an." It sounded exotic like sapphire or emerald....For my fourth-grade family heritage report, I boasted that I was Scotch-Irish on my father's side, and on my mother's side we were Lesbian. I did not understand when Mrs. Faust sent me to the nurse's office to wait for my mother after school....

My mother nodded to Nurse Witmer, and together they fumbled over blunt phrases they had hoped wouldn't be necessary....Visits to my grandmothers became charged with my new knowledge, as if I had just been given the secret ingredient in the family recipe for barbecue sauce. I never had to entertain the baggage of my mother's childhood; I could see my grandmothers with the wonder they were due. When I was with them, I felt cemented into my heritage in a way that surpassed the fourth-grade curriculum.

Dalla seconda/terza di copertina:

As a young girl, Barbara Jean Ellington spent summers at her grandmothers' home in a small Pennsylvania town. It was not the most conventional of households, formed as it was by two women who lived as partners in life as well as in business, but it had been a welcome retreat for a shy girl who had issues with her own mother and who needed room to grow.

Now both grandmothers have died, and BJ has come back to the small house near Blue Lake to sort through the remnants of their lives and the tatters of her own. She arrives with her young son, desperately in need of time to herself—time to come to terms with her husband's sudden decision to end their marriage. Over the course of the summer, childhood memories come into sharp focus, especially with the reappearance of Travis, the man for whom, when they were both teenagers, she harbored a secret crush. Now, suddenly free, she must decide whether she's ready to take a second chance at love.

More unsettling, however, is the discovery of an unmailed letter written by BJ's grandmother Nonna to BJ's own late mother filled with revelations both startling and confusing. Finding secrets within secrets, BJ begins piecing together the truth of the past.

Summers at Blue Lake is an engrossing and rewarding debut novel in the tradition of works by popular novelists such as Elizabeth Berg, Sue Miller, and Anita Shreve.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Algonquin Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1565124960
• ISBN 13: 9781565124967
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 325