The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me

This is a novel that will stay with me for a very long time. Impressive as a first novel, it is Southern Fiction at its finest. At the beginning of the novel we meet 16-year-old Haley Ellyson, who reveals that she helped bury a black man in the woods behind her house and that she is having an affair with her father's best friend, Bo Dickens. Home for the summer of 1987 after graduating from a Connecticut prep school, Fletcher Greel is the opposite of Bo. The story of this special summer is told alternately by Haley and Fletcher. Fletcher starts his summer working for his father who is the judge in Houser Banks. He soon links up with an old friend, Riley, and through him, meets and falls in love with Haley. The young lovers spend the summer with their best friends, Riley White and his blues-singing black girlfriend, Crystal. As the summer passes, Riely and Crystal are increasingly harassed by the town's rednecks. Secrets are confessed and the lives of both pairs of lovers are put in jeopardy.

The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me is truly one of the best novels I've ever read. Suzanne Kingsbury's characters are so well-developed and real that I feel like they were my friends from high school. I finished the book a few weeks ago, and I still think about Haley and Fletcher everyday. The poetic last sentence of the novel rings in my mind again and again. I'm sure that The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me is a novel I'll never forget.

I felt as if I'd actually spent the summer with Haley and Fletcher. I didn't want it to end but I couldn't wait to get there. Although wanting to linger to enjoy the poetry of the writing, I found myself impatiently turning the pages. The characters became friends or enemies and loved, hated or feared and altogether believable. They shared their fated summer becoming as complex as real life. The southern inflections are drawn with a sassy down home brush. But the result is subtle and even and as pervasive as the Mississippi summer heat. Don't miss this special read.

This is a book to be read from cover to cover, savoring each paragraph. An impossible book to put down, Suzanne Kingsbury takes you to one hot and sticky summer in Houser Banks, Mississippi. There you are invited into the lives of Haley, Fletcher, Crystal and Riley complete with thoughts, dreams, sadnesses and celebration. The writing is so lush you can feel the heat of the hot mississippi sun on your back, and relief in the cool water of a river swim. Kingsbury has a gift for capturing adolescence: what it is like to be a teenager, to think like a teenager, and to feel like a teenager. She is able to bring you back to that place where you feel clear about some things while cloudy over others, feel the electricity in a touch, the ache of souring secrets, and the intensity of falling in love. I could just as vividly recall the smell of a horse barn, as I could the sensation of brushing the hair off my face as we sped about backroads with the top down.Here, at long last, is a story and four characters you will remember long after you've flipped the back cover shut.

The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me, a first novel by Suzanne Kingsbury is one of the best novels I've read in some time.It is the summer of 1987 in a small southern town. You could liken it a bit to "To Kill a Mockingbird", told from a 16 year old voice instead. It is so hot every word seems to sizzle.I'll be watching for a second novel fron this writer!