One Summer in Savannah, by Terah Shelton Harris
I was poking around on the library’s Libby app, and found this book, which was being promoted by the library (I’m not sure what program it was, and couldn’t find it again). At any rate, I downloaded it and started listening.
Sara Lancaster is a young woman who moved away from her home in Savannah, Georgia at the age of 18. She wasn’t trying to escape an overbearing father, she wasn’t eager to travel the world. She wasn’t even going to an out of state college. Instead she was fleeing the circumstances of her life. Sara was the victim of a rape by a fellow student at the age of 17, and she was now pregnant with his child. Although he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the crime, she felt she needed to flee to prevent him (and his family) from having any custody or visitation rights to her child.
Now, eight years later, her father is ill and could die. Sara and her daughter Alana, return to Savannah to see her father and spend time with him for whatever time he has left. Over the next few weeks, she encounters her rapist’s twin brother, who figures out who Alana is. Sara decides to allow him to have time with Alana, but only if he promises to keep her a secret from the rest of his family.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. The story flowed and it kept me engaged from the beginning to the end. However, there were some details that I found quite unbelievable in the story line.
Here are the spoilers! Sara’s father is educated and wise; a bookstore owner (that part I loved!). However, he speaks only in poetry, leaving his friends and family to try to decipher his meaning. There is no medical reason for this – he hasn’t had a stroke that has changed the synapses in his brain – he just likes poetry. Somehow the other characters just seemed to get it, but I ended up having to gloss over his character to not get bogged down with whether their interpretations made sense. The poetry thing seemed arbitrary and inconvenient, and would drive me nuts!
The story is a love story; which ordinarily I’m a fan of love stories, but… Sara finds herself falling in love with Jacob, who is no less than her rapist’s IDENTICAL twin brother. She is traumatized by the rape, but somehow finds a way to fall in love with this man’s identical twin. I’m going to call that unlikely…
Of course, there’s a happy ending, with a little bit of a cliffhanger, so I was left wondering about a few details at the end of the book. Even with those weaknesses, it was a good book. It spoke of facing your past, moving past your traumas, and the importance of familial bonds.
One more thing – I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator (Zuzu Robinson) was awful. She spoke with a cadence that was way too slow, with a strange sing-song rhythm and too-long pauses at odd times. I sped the narration up to 1.5x to make it less annoying, but if you want to read it, I would recommend reading it instead of listening.
3 stars.
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