Saltash Cramleigh March 2015 Winter 2014 | Page 36

BOOK REVIEW

“We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves”

The Perfect Summer
by Karen Joy Fowler.

Fancy a challenging read for the autumn? This book was suggested to our book group because
it would “provoke discussion”. I actually missed the meeting because I was on holiday – and
reading “beach” books which didn’t provoke very much at all – but
I decided, on my return, that I would try this one out of sheer
curiosity; everyone who had read it was talking about it and I
wanted to know why.

by Juliet Nicolson

First of all, I can’t tell you about the plot in too much detail or it
This isn’t a novel, at the end of the first lively style and
will spoil the impact although the author’s few chapters which
anecdotal
made me sitapproach make it seem like one. The book search
up and take notice anyway! Basically, it is a
describes the summer of 1911 – one of the hottest on record
for a time when veryis thepeoplecharacter’s elder brother and
two siblings: one few main realised that war was looming,
–
the other is her sister. She finds both eventually and theywere
but a period of unrest when strikes and suffragettes are
not dead – and that is all I amstability. to say about them
shaking political and social prepared
here.
Nicolson concentrates on individuals from all classes whose

However, during this summer either characterised or changed
I can say that the book is set in North America
actions
and that some of thein Britain at the beginningrights and animal
what was going on major themes are animal of the
experimentation. In spite of well-known names areabout ]X