Summer by Ali Smith: book review

Summer (2020) is set in Brighton in the United Kingdom in the summer of 2020. It begins one week after Brexit. Summer is the last book of the Seasonal series: Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), and Spring (2019).

Although many characters are recurring, this can be read as a standalone novel.

Sacha Greenlaw is a 16-year-old school girl. She is tasked with writing a school essay on ‘forgiveness.’ She is also writing letters to a Vietnamese man in immigration detention, whom she calls Hero. He has been in detention for nearly three years.

She is watching the sky for the first sign of summer – the sighting of the swift. Its arrival on English shores signals the start of summer.

She lives with her 13-year-old brother Robert. Their parents are separated and are having a ‘meltdown’ about getting older. Robert thinks his parents are ‘laughable’ but it’s the first time he has ever thought of the world in terms of there being more than himself in it.

Somewhere in the plot, years ago, Sacha and Robert meet Daniel Gluck and his sister Hannah from Germany. Both brothers and sisters are on the brink of change.

The beginning of the book is rambling and pointless. The word “summer” is mentioned for the first time after a hundred pages.

Although this is a best-selling series, I thought the book was too long, too disjointed, too hastily written, and too boring. I won’t be reading the other three books in the Seasonal quartet.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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