Summers at Blue Lake: A Novel

By Jill Althouse-Wood

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565124960
• ISBN13: 9781565124967
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Length: 325 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.7" x 1.1" x 5.7"

Customer Reviews

Summers At Blue Lake

A haunting story about love, family and family secrets. The story revolves around the choices we make in the name of love and the never ending ripples it creates in our family. It sprinkles in family history and heritage real or imagined, accepted or shunned. Summers at Blue Lake has strong characters that you want to know personally. The nostalgia can take you back to the summers of your youth and things you never grasped or comprehended. A quick read.

Loved it!

The secrets of BJ's family are nothing like I could have imagined! This book quickly gains momentum and just keeps running; I could barely put it down- finished it in 2 days even with 2 small children of my own. The "flashbacks" are very easy to follow. A wonderful book that is just a plain, great read. Enjoy!

Awesome Summer Read!

I loved this book. I bought it Saturday morning and started reading it at my Saturday morning pedicure. I couldn't put it down and finished it Sunday afternoon between loads of laundry. If any of you are involved in a book club, it would be a great book for that. Lots of good discussion could come from a book like this. It's a book about family secrets, remembering your teen summers, about going through divorce, about loving yourself and deciding what and who you are. A great summer read. And as a note to Publisher's Weekly: Precociousness is spelled wrong in your review and isn't used properly even if it were. Precocious means having an unusual maturity at an early age...like a precocious child. How could "the novel falls victim to prose leaden with preciousness" even make sense? I personally loved the analogies made in this book. A couple of times, I thought to myself... "That was brilliant...How did she come up with that!" Try it, I think you will like it as much as I did.