Brief thoughts on a first pair of summer-themed reads: coming-of-age stories about teenage girls who trade England for somewhere more exciting – France or Greece – for a summer and awaken to the complications of sex when let down by the adults in their lives. Both: 
The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden (1958)
We wanted to read something by Godden in my book club’s women’s classics subgroup, and decided on this almost purely for the evocative title. Cecil is the second of five children who run amok at a French hotel while their father is botanizing in Tibet and their mother in hospital with an infected horsefly bite. Hotel staff and hangers-on are engaged in all sorts of shenanigans – affairs and casual molestation of the maids, for instance – and the children, caught up in the thrill of it, attach themselves to Eliot, the English lover of Mademoiselle Zizi. The adults get Cecil and her older sister, Joss, drunk on champagne. Joss is the belle of the ball and attracts an inappropriate suitor; Cecil gets her first period and tells Eliot, of all people. It’s a familiar message in mid-century fiction, I suppose: loss of sexual innocence leads to disaster. I found this quite melodramatic, with a sudden ending; it didn’t live up to the terrific premise. I was similarly underwhelmed by Black Narcissus. (University library)
Sunburn by Andi Watson; illus. Simon Gane (2022)
We open in suburban London in what appears to be the 1950s. Sixteen-year-old Rachel is offered a lucky escape from a summer of working at the butcher shop to stay with her parents’ friends, the Warners, at their home on a Greek island. Their life is a heady mix of languorous shopping, swimming and nightly parties. There’s a big contrast between the sophisticated expats and the local peasantry. When Rachel meets Ben, a fellow English teenager, it seems like her idyllic summer is complete, but things sour between them. Over the course of the book, Rachel realizes that not all grown-ups can be trusted. The plot took a twist I wasn’t expecting, which is always refreshing, but I should probably have been ready for it based on the depictions. The graphic novel is all in shades of blue, with white and light brown accents, as befitting the Greek flag and scenery. A problem I had was that most of the characters look the same – the artist has just the one way of drawing faces, so Rachel, Mrs. Warner and Ben have pretty much identical features. I would have catalogued this in YA. (Public library)
Both at least had a steamy summer atmosphere! My next seasonal read, picked up from the library today, will be One Midsummer’s Day by Mark Cocker, which is all about swifts. We have a pair nesting in our eaves again this year – hurrah! – and have been enjoying watching their (albeit diminished) screaming parties tear down the streets on warm summer evenings.
Any “summer” or “sun” books for you this year?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 
I haven’t read The Greengage Summer in a long time, but I remember being a little creeped out by it. I though Black Narcissus was very atmospheric, though.
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Definitely creepy the way these adults carry on, and involve two underage girls in their bad behaviour.
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Yes.
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Oh, we had a marvellous early summer break under Mark Cocker’s leadership last May in the Balkans. It was wonderful, an extended Nature Ramble. And he was the guest of honour recently at our local Nature Reserve’s annual summer picnic, so he was able to sign our copy of One Midsummer’s Day, which I’ve finally wrestled from my husband and am now enjoying. Compare notes later? I’ll pass on your other reading suggestions this time, I think.
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Wow, those are special connections! It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything of his and I’m looking forward to this.
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Well, my first 100 pages have been rewarding .
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The Greengage Summer is one of those books I feel like I’ve read because it just seems to be around so much, but I actually haven’t. I should read more Godden, though.
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I haven’t been particularly taken with the two I’ve read as they seemed melodramatic and of their time. But maybe there are some gems I haven’t discovered yet!
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In This House of Brede is great. I agree about Black Narcissus.
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I did enjoy Godden’s The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, both for being set on Lake Garda and also because it felt semi-autobiographical (which gave it a ring of truth). Anyway, I’ve wanted to try another title by her for a while and this might do, for all that it didn’t blow you away!
No ‘summer’ books this year for me, although Maigret and the Loner was set during August, a popular time for Parisians to decamp from the city. Wonder how they’re going to manage this year, with dangerous temperatures already manifesting now, in July.
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That does sound appealing. I didn’t know she had an Italian novel; I mostly think of her as having written about India.
We’ve been grateful for the relatively mild and wet summer here, but of course worried to hear about the heat waves on the Continent — we’re all in this crisis together.
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[…] I was here, ICYMI.) Cooler days here as we say a drawn-out farewell to summer and welcome in early autumn; […]
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