Summer Snow by Nicole Baart is a sequel to her first novel, After the Leaves Fall. Summer Snow is written in first person, in prose, to tell the story of Julia, a college drop-out who finds herself pregnant at nineteen-years-old and working at the local grocery store. She lives with just her grandmother in a small town in Iowa when her estranged mother, Janice, shows up on the farm house porch with a big surprise. Janice walked out on Julia ten years earlier and her return is the catalyst for Julia’s journey to discover the meaning of forgiveness and grace.
I’ve never been a big fan of fiction written in prose form. I need dialogue and interaction between characters to keep the story moving forward. This book was written with a lot of personal introspect with the main character and it didn’t seem like much happened in the first few chapters, so it took me about a quarter of the book to get into the story. But Baart began to hit her stride and story began to move forward for me after the first 100 pages. By the time I reached the half-way point of the story, I found myself caring about the characters and wrapped up in their journeys.
As Julia progresses through her pregnancy and tries to figure out her relationship with Janice, she begins to face some serious choices and recognizes the parallels between her life and her mother’s. There is a bit of a twist at the end that I did not see coming, and even though some wonderful events take place, this isn’t a book where everything is wrapped up in a tidy bow and all problems are resolved by the last page. Baart writes so that Julia’s journey continues even after the last word is read. Perhaps Baart plans on writing another book about Julia? Even though Summer Snow is a sequel, it is not necessary to read the first book. I didn’t…and I felt as though this book could easily stand alone. This was a pretty good book about mother/daughter relationships and did an excellent job of portraying the grace available from God, without being preachy at all. Baart is skillfully subtle in getting her point across that no how matter how lonely someone may feel, they are never alone.
Reviewed by Melissa Paulson
