Helpful Score: 2
I'm always a bit leary about coming of age stories or stories written about young teens. I wonder if the author has weird memories, but they don't seem like any teens that I have known. This book is different, the teens are likeable and believable, very well done. Author did a fine job looking back at the time period. Many interesting relationships and characterizations. If I have one complaint it would be that there are no more books by this author.
Everyone in the small Texas town wondered why the Sanders family had come back to town and bought the house next door to Ms. Perry. It is the last place they should want to be. As summer progresses the motives for moving are clear, but the havoc it wreaks on the family teaches a young girl that passion listens to the heart and not to reason.
"Everybody in Rosalita, Texas, wondered why the Sanders family had come back to town and bought the house next door to Lou Jean Perry. It was the absolute last place they should want to be. Now, Kayla Sanders looks back on that sizzling summer of her childhood, when the secrets of the past cast long shadows over two families' lives." "In June 1967 Lou Jean Perry's husband, the first and only person from Rosalita killed in Vietnam, had been dead for more than a year. When thirteen-year-old Kayla first met her, a laughing Lou Jean executed a perfect backbend right there on her sparkling clean kitchen floor. It stood to reason that this bright-spirited woman - the complete opposite of Kayla's brittle, churchgoing mother, Sarah Jo - would become Kayla's new best friend." As the heat and madness of summer intensified, Sarah Jo's motives for moving next to Lou Jean would become clear, but not before a family's foundation cracks and crumbles, a woman is driven to the brink of madness, and a young girl discovers that passion listens not to the mind's reason but to the heart's demands.
