Read. Write. Listen. Create.

*The end of this review has spoilers*

This book was harder for me to get into, but by the middle I started to enjoy the characters and story more. I gave it a 3.5 out of 5 stars. Partially based on the #MeToo movement, One Summer In Savannah tells the story of Sara Lancaster who left her home in Savannah eight years prior to the start of the book.

This nominee for Best Debut Novel of 2023’s short summary states that it’s been “eight years since her daughter, Alana, came into this world, following a terrifying sexual assault that left deep emotional wounds Sara would do anything to forget. But when Sara’s father falls ill, she’s forced to return home and face the ghosts of her past.”

I liked how there were chapters from Sara’s point of view as well as the twin brother of her attacker, Daniel. At first I didn’t want to hear Daniel’s brother, Jacob’s side of the story. But as the story goes on, you learn Jacob is nothing like his brother and deserves to feel the pain his brother caused on his family. Our book club talked about how alarming it was that Sara fell in love with the identical twin brother of her rapist. Views were mixed, but one member of the group brought up how if you know twins, you know how to tell them apart and know that they aren’t the same person no matter how identical they may appear.

Goodreads’ summary says, “while caring for her father and running his bookstore, Sara is desperate to protect her curious, outgoing, genius daughter from the Wylers, the family of the man who assaulted her. Sara thinks she can succeed―her attacker is in prison, his identical twin brother left town years ago, and their mother are all unaware Alana exists. But she soon learns that Jacob has just returned to Savannah to piece together the fragments of his once-great family. And when their two worlds collide―the type of force Sara explores in her poetry and Jacob in his astrophysics―they are drawn together in unexpected ways.”

While this book is about forgiveness, I’m not sure the mother of Daniel and Jacob deserves forgiveness. She never believed her son raped Sara and doesn’t want to hear anything about it. Daniel is dying from cancer and when Sara’s father is in the hospital for his illness, they’re at the same hospital at the same time. The ending of the book felt rushed to me and while Jacob and his mother are visiting Daniel in the hospital Sara agrees to let Alana meet her father and grandmother even though she was against letting that happen during the entire book.

Certain aspects didn’t feel needed like Jacob decided to help Alana with her math studies and they were working towards a Google Science Fair, but then the fair gets canceled. Daniel gets interviewed about his case and it is shown on TV, but Sara doesn’t watch it so we only hear about it from other characters. It felt as though the author wanted to use these ideas in a bigger way for the story, but didn’t quite flesh them out. This book fell in-between for me, but it does reveal the lengths a mother will go to in order to protect her child and herself from her past.