Still Summer, Jacquelyn Mitchard
Still Summer, Jacquelyn Mitchard
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Still Summer

Author: Jacquelyn Mitchard

Narrator: Susan Ericksen

Abridged: 6 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/23/2007

Categories: Fiction


Synopsis

Mitchard's Still Summer plunges into terror

By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY

Secure your life preserver. Tie yourself to the mast. It's late August, but it's still summer, and Jacquelyn Mitchard is taking you on a thrill ride you won't forget.

Mitchard made her mark in the literary world in 1996 when The Deep End of the Ocean was chosen as the first pick for Oprah Winfrey's now-legendary book club. Since then, she has written six other novels, but none matches the suspenseful pitch of Still Summer.

It's a tale of terror on the high seas, but this is no Pirates of the Caribbean wannabe.

Readers know something terrible is going to happen, but Mitchard ratchets up the suspense by allowing her story to unfold at a leisurely pace. She painstakingly fleshes out her characters, because as readers will discover, their temperaments and personalities are as crucial to the story as the mounting disasters.

Tracy Kyle, Holly Solvig and Olivia Montefalco, lifelong friends in their early 40s, charter a yacht and two-man crew for a sailing vacation that will take them from St. Thomas to Grenada.

The trip starts out as an innocent adventure in paradise until two accidents in quick succession strand the women without their crew. What else can go wrong? In a word, everything. The engine conks out, the sails are torn, lack of electricity spoils their food and limits their drinking water - and then there's the injury to Holly's leg.

Nature's fury, murderous drug dealers and, possibly most deadly of all, their own frailties and secrets are added to the list.

Readers will wring their hands with frustration, weep with sadness and second-guess the choices these women make. But since characters must do the bidding of the authors who create them, we can only sit back - or sit on the edge of our seats - and let Mitchard's terror-filled tale wash over us.

About Jacquelyn Mitchard

New York Times bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard has written many novels for adults, including Two If by Sea. She has also written young adult novels; children’s books; a memoir, Mother Less Child; and a collection of essays, The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship. Her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was the inaugural selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, later adapted for a feature film starring and produced by Michelle Pfeiffer. Mitchard is the editor in chief and co-creator of Merit Press and a professor of fiction and creative nonfiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband and their nine children.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Patty on September 01, 2012

I've met the author of this book and she's a nice person but I'm afraid my review is lukewarm at best. I really liked Deep End of the Ocean and haven't read anything else she's written except her column in the local paper. This book gets off to a slow start. I almost gave up because I really wasn't......more

Goodreads review by Jo on June 24, 2010

Wow, I really had to stick with this. I wasn't particularly sympathetic to these characters. But they were caught in circumstances beyond their control and that I could respect. I will never take a vacation on a small sailboat. And what was the obsession with the can opener? It read more as a screen......more

Goodreads review by Melissa (Semi-hiatus for Work) on September 02, 2020

Pleasure cruise goes horribly wrong. Mitchard definitely has a way of making the reader think and feel emotions.......more

Goodreads review by Cynthia on July 21, 2020

In all fairness, I wish I hadn’t read the reviews before I read this book. This is the story of three former high school chums who book a vacation aboard a small cruise vessel. The author does provide in depth peeks into the history of the chums and their respective families and community entangleme......more

Goodreads review by Sharron on October 18, 2015

Once I got the multiple characters straight, I totally loved this novel. It was suspenseful and captivating. I cried and held my breath with the tension. Excellent!!......more