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    Summer We Fell Apart: A Novel
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    Summer We Fell Apart: A Novel
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    Summer We Fell Apart: A Novel
    Ebook424 pages6 hours

    Summer We Fell Apart: A Novel

    By Robin Antalek

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    “[A] well-crafted and cunning debut novel…a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.”
    —Publishers Weekly

    The Summer We Fell Apart by newcomer Robin Antalek is a poignant, funny, and totally engrossing novel of family disasters and sibling rivalry—and it marks the debut of a pitch-perfect new voice in contemporary American fiction. Antalek’s tale of the trials and many tribulations of the hapless and more than a little dysfunctional Haas family recalls the work of Sue Miller and Ann Beattie—and is a wonderful introduction to a superb writer whose short fiction has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Glimmer Train’s Family Matter’s and Short-Story Award and the Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJan 5, 2010
    ISBN9780061960666
    Author

    Robin Antalek

    Robin Antalek is the author of The Summer We Fell Apart. She lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

    Read more from Robin Antalek

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    Reviews for Summer We Fell Apart

    4/5

    65 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      a family of tortured, damaged souls each tell a part of this novel. really enjoyed it!!!
    • 3/5
      This book is told from 5 different pov--the four children and the mother. Only the one daughter's is told from first person. Each of the children's parts could almost be read alone. The mom's was the last section and brought everything together. Some really interesting ideas about family in this one.
    • 4/5
      The focus starts when 4 siblings all react to their father dying. Most of these siblings aren't close, and the story is told from all 4 points of view, but it picks up where the other left off. There is wonderful character development and just when you start to understand one perspective it's time to read from someone else's view.

      If you have brothers or sisters, if you get along or you don't, if your family is close or it isn't, this book is for you. A wonderful tale of a family that wants to pull together and break free at the same time, I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone. The only reason it doesn't get 5 stars is because a couple of themes that keep coming up don't get answered... which is always good to keep the imagination going, but I loved these characters so much I wanted to know everything. Robin Antalek is wonderful in this debut and I can't wait for her to write another.
    • 3/5
      Story of a family-5 parts told from the viewpoint of five different family members. Interesting but I didn't really like any of the people.
    • 4/5
      a family of tortured, damaged souls each tell a part of this novel. really enjoyed it!!!
    • 2/5
      I found this book quite difficult to get into; it seemed to jump from time to time (i.e., past to future) without a clear delineation of how much time had passed. I found the first narrator, or point of view focus, Amy, to be bratty and self-centered, so that turned me off. George was by far the most interesting and sympathetic character. However, this just felt more like a mish-mash or hodgepodge of random thoughts thrown together; I understand the cohesive part was supposed to be the dysfunctional parenting, but that was barely noticeable--to me, anyway.
    • 4/5
      This is the story of a family with four kids (who are mostly adult in the timespan the novel covers) and neglectful parents (the father dies early in the book). The "children" are Kate (hyper-responsible, control freak lawyer), Finn (budding alcoholic), George (gay and lovable), and Amy (somewhat self-centered artist). While the characters were not always likable (with the exception of George), their struggles felt real. I liked how the author included a section about the mother at the end, so her point of view was explored as well.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed the way this story was told - five characters (four siblings and their mother) and their five points of view. It almost gave it a feel as if they were five loosely related stories - but in the end I think the stories were so well-blended and ran so fluidly from one to the next that I couldn't classify it as a compilation of short stories.The characters Ms. Antalek riddles these pages with will become your friends. You will laugh and shed tears with them. Their stories will make you fall in love, they will cause you heart break, but mostly they will make you feel as if you are a part of this dysfunctional family.This is an emotionally riveting book which covers a range of family issues — a wrecked marriage, substance abuse, sibling rivalries, adults coming to terms with their upbringing and how all these issues affect their relationships.I picked this book up and devoured it within a couple of hours and was actually saddened that my time with it was over much too quickly. For fans of character driven novels, with loads of family drama, this is definitely one you won't want to miss out on.
    • 4/5
      The four Haas siblings had anything but a normal childhood, growing up the children of a once famous playwright and a cult actress, mostly neglected as their parents pursued their own dreams and desires. Told in four main sections (a fifth smaller section narrated by their mother closes the book) as Amy, George, Finn and Kate move into adulthood and on with their lives away from the dysfunction that reigned supreme throughout their childhood, the novel illuminates who they have become and why.Amy wants, more than anything, to be normal and to have a normal life. George is searching for love and the acceptance that no one aside from Amy ever offered him. Kate has shut herself off emotionally and in lieu of a relationship, drives herself through her high-powered legal job. And Finn, the least likely to make waves when they were younger, is drinking himself into an early grave. None of the four is undamaged by their unbringing. But each of the four is also struggling to overcome and to learn the happiness they were never taught as children watching their parents lash out at and destroy each others' lives with carelessness, apathy and disloyalty. Through it all, none of the siblings is capable of severing connections entirely. Each retains a shred of love for their parents and for each other which manifests itself throughout the years covered in the novel in surprising ways.Although there is no physical abuse, the scars of the characters' early lives are still raw and visible. And that makes this book sad in tone and emotionally draining. And yet, despite this almost despairing sense, there is hope in the fragile family connections they retain and in their developing abilities to make a new, stronger family for themselves amongst those who accept and love them in the end. The writing here is fluid and smoothly sweeps the reader along. The characters, flawed and pitiable as they all are, are entirely sympathetic. We are given more about Amy and George than about Kate and Finn but perhaps their aching for love and normalcy in their lives is more resonant than the workaholism and alcoholism of Kate and Finn would have been. The story was not full of action and fireworks but was quietly emotional and relentless and true to life. And yet there was a lost and wandering, a sense of melancholy to the tale that burrows into the reader, keeping the pages turning in hopes of finding out that these characters find some happiness and sense of peace for themselves in the end.The final section of the book, narrated by Marilyn, the mother of these four bent not broken siblings, was much more hopeful than the sections narrated by the siblings but it was almost a bit too hopeful given her absence and neglect from their lives to that point. Certainly her remorse at what she recognizes she's had a large hand in doing to her children is earned and their continued slight wariness in her presence feels authentic but without understanding how she has come to face her past transgressions, it seems so different from the rest of the book that it makes a bit of an awkward fit. A complex stew of modern day family, dysfunctions, and the things that keep us bound, however tenuously, this is a gripping, gut-aching story and one that will keep you thinking long after the last page is turned.
    • 4/5
      In this revealing family saga, the four very different siblings of the Haas family must come to terms with their approaching adulthood and with each other. Amy, the youngest, is constantly searching for normalcy in her life after a childhood that was anything but normal. George, the sensitive one, is looking for the love and acceptance he never got as a child. Kate, the oldest, is on a quest to drive the past out of her mind with hard-won success and business acumen. And Finn, the most damaged of the four, is slowly drinking himself to death in an effort to escape the past. Growing up as children in the house of absent and cold show business parents, the four siblings had no one to rely on but each other. But time has scattered each of them in different directions and given them different lives. Now the fast approaching death of their father will bring them all together again, towards the reconciliation and unity that has evaded them for most of their adult lives. Hopeful, yet at times painful, The Summer We Fell Apart is moving look at an emotionally complex brood of people who never give up struggling for harmony amongst themselves.Sometimes it's really hard to put my feelings about a book into words. This could happen for many reasons, but in this case I think the reason for it is because my feelings on this book never really reached the surface; they stayed at gut level and worked deeper and deeper from there. That's not a complaint about the book in any way, it's just that for me, the feelings in this book were at times very uncomfortable on a deep level. I would liken it to the feeling you have when you get a splinter in your finger. You know it's there, it's painful for sure, but it's not a gory wound that is up at the surface of the skin, it is buried and tender to the touch. That's much how I felt about this book. There weren't too many major dramas and messy confrontations sprinkled throughout the pages, but what remained was tender and raw in a way that wrenched my stomach.The book was a powerful read and one that made me really empathize with the characters. I think that it hit home so much for me because I grew up in a house with absent and emotionally uninvolved parents and I felt that the hurts that these siblings incurred were some of the same hurts that I had felt myself at one time or another. It was uncomfortable to see them all struggling to get attention from a mother who didn't know how to give it and it touched something deep in me to see them reacting to a father who was emotionally unavailable in the extreme. All the more complex emotions and themes of family life were there for me and I think that the author did a great job in making these characters real and believable. At times their reactions prompted a panic in me, for I was much too familiar with how they were feeling and those long forgotten feelings of the past were not always pleasant to revisit. This, I think, was a brilliant feat for the author to have managed; to have so masterfully created your characters that they scream with life and relevance right off the page and into your reader's psyche.The relationship between the siblings felt both unique and authentic to me as well. Each of the four had complex reactions and feelings for each other. Oftentimes those emotions conflicted with each other, which is something that I felt was truly representative of the relationships between siblings. I found the troubled relationship between Kate and Finn to be very compelling for me to read. Kate, the ultimate fixer, was unable to fix Finn no matter how hard she tried, while Finn struggled between his loyalty to his sister and his loyalty to the bottle, creating havoc in both of their lives. At the polar opposite was the relationship between Amy and George, a relationship filled with mutual respect and affectionate ribbing. I think that the author did an amazing job of creating complex and multifaceted relationships between her characters, not just the characters themselves, and sprinkling those relationships with astute and penetrating emotion and dialogue as well.The last section of the book looked at life through the eyes of the children's mother. This was different, because previously, the book had been divided into sections focusing on one of each of the four siblings. I found that the section dealing with the siblings' mother, Marilyn, was a little more hopeful. Maybe it was because she voiced thoughts of remorse and acted as though she wished to rebuild the relationships she had missed with her children. Maybe it was because I finally got a peek into the mind of a character who up until that point had been shrouded in silence and mystery. Whatever the reason, this last chapter seemed to give me a hopeful attitude towards the the future for these characters, which is something I had not been expecting but was pleased to see.This book had a wonderful directness of emotion and the ability to face some of the unpleasantness of family life, and I think those who enjoy long and involving family sagas would appreciate this book. If you are a reader who delights in character studies, you might also like this book, as there is much to feast on in that respect. I think that for me, although the book hit unfailingly close to home, I took great satisfaction in the story and its eventual and well-deserved conclusion. A very emotionally complex read, and well worth your time.