Invincible Summer

On the surface, this is a book about four friends who meet in college and how they grow together and apart over the next twenty years. Anyone who has made the journey into adulthood while trying to hang on to relationships from youth will relate to this story. These flawed and loveable characters have made a deep connection that is challenged by marriage, divorce, children, illness and all that the real world has in store.They are pulled apart, sometimes for years at a time, as their lives take them in very different directions. Eva finds success as a financial analyst while Sylvie struggles to make it as an artist. Benedict settles down and begins raising children while Lucien's partying ways get him into real trouble. They disagree about matters of faith and politics and class. As they have less in common, there's less to talk about and they have doubts about each other. But they come back together because their connection is about deeper things.Alice Adams is an accomplished writer and I look forward to whatever she writes next. -Katie O'Rourke, Finding Charlie

This was such a good novel I had trouble getting the characters out of my head. All four of them—Sylvie and her brother, Lucien, Eva, and Dominick— and are college age when we meet them, or, at university, as the Brits say. In Bristol. The time is almost contemporary, before heavy social media but within the Age of the Internet, and as they approach adulthood, each has challenges to face. Perhaps Dominick is the most conventional, a physicist on his way to a doctorate. Eva decides to forsake physics for banking in the City. Sylvie looks forward to the fruition of her artistic talent, and Lucien, the operator, toward a certain kind of hip extravagance. They could be stereotypical, but Adams puts enough substance into them that they mature in complex individuals within a social context that is familiar to this American reader with a shade of British difference.Everybody is white, but there are levels of social and financial difference that are perhaps more openly acknowledged than they might be in the US. Eva's Socialist father is appalled that she went into banking. Dominick's parents love Eva in spite of her cluelessness about the ways of the leisure class. Sylvie and Lucien have significant differences of opinion about their alcoholic mother. There is effort and travel and, yes, occasional recreational drug use. They think they are unique, but sadly, life is not always kind.As a novelist, Adams has what I consider the right stuff—a keen psychological and social intelligence and the ability to move the action forward to consequences that sometimes surprise but never shock the attentive reader. These are characteristics that I admired in another Alice Adams, the California writer who died in 1999, but, of course, this is a different generation. Somehow, I think the other Alice Adams would have liked this book.

I first read this book from our library because as I waited for my wife I noticed it was recommend by the library manager, but then bought it because the main character Eve reminded me so much of my daughter. I would describe the book as a good read for a woman on vacation at the beach. The title Invincible Summer is taken from a line in the book, but bears little description of the book itself. The author has very good character development as the plot flows from one of four personal dramas over the course of several years. She has captured the new values or lack of them of many women under the age of 40. For her first book, Ms. Adams has put in an incredible amount of work! Her book is not typical of what I read, but it's very well done.

Review: 4.5 / 5“If you could know the answer to any question, what would it be?”— Alice AdamsFrom the engrossing first line to the mystical story that followed, Alice Adams debut novel captured my attention for a multitude of reasons. The whole story unfolds and blossoms with emotion, character development, and a story that makes you want to see what happens next in these people's lives. I don't want to say that this is a sad story, but the description puts it best when it says that this is an unexpected journey. The reader can really grow with the characters through all of the events that take place in front of them. The four main characters each have their own storylines that intertwine with each other to create a heartbreaking and multi-dimensional saga of people still trying to find what it means to be an adult.“We all think we’re unique snowflakes, but we’re not really. Do you remember how we thought we were so different when we were young, like we were on the fringes of society because we dyed our hair and did drugs at parties? Christ, we’d have loathed it then if we knew how like everyone else we are, how people are just the same the world over. Funny, because it feels rather comforting now, I feel sort of grounded by it.”— Alice AdamsRather than a story of love and loss, this seems more like a character study of all four protagonists as love and loss hits them throughout their growing up. Even though I am on the fringes of adulthood, I could see the path these characters took and realized just how real these story lines could be. I felt that these characters are people that I could just casually walk by on the street and that is what I loved about the novel. The readers get to dive deep into the personal lives of the characters and live out their lives with them and through their eyes do we really see what it is like to be someone else. I find that I keep thinking back to events of the novel and just how many emotions I felt throughout reading the text. I honestly cannot recommend this enough for people who would be interested. Don't let the synopsis distract you from picking up the book. I honestly thought that this was going to bore me into not wanting to keep reading it, but then as I started I realized just how wrong I was.I want to compare the novel to be a mix of The Vacationers by Emma Straub and A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, and while that might be the comparison, I feel that this book stand apart from those. While it might not be as engrossing and though provoking as A Little Life, it still has the emotion of the story, but mixed in with the fluffy writing from The Vacationers. I would highly recommend it for anyone that loves to feel sad, likes adult contemporary, and are looking for a quick beach read with substance.“You felt as if you were getting a glimpse of a secret world while everyone else slept. Now the cars never stop and the lights never go out. But out here you can still just make out the constellations and it puts things into perspective, makes you feel like what you really are, a tiny mammal on the surface of a planet spinning through infinite space amidst a billion stars. Easy to forget that, don’t you find?”— Alice Adams

Very well done. It follows imperfect people through 20ish years of life, and tells their stories in a compelling way. I found myself yearning to get back to this book and finish. Worth it.