Home For The Summer is the merciless tale of a disturbed teenage girl returning from two years in a mental facility. Alice is “funny, sharp-witted, and in some ways deeply moral” (New York Times Review of Books), but she is also capable of unpredictable cruelty and violence. As the novel unfolds, secrets from the past are revealed, and a simple narrative becomes a gripping parable about the disintegration of the American family. Alice is in a state of violence like America itself.
Georgina Kleege
Praise for Home for the Summer
Alice is America itself, in a state of pure violence.
— Etel Adnan
Home for the Summer is a strange and compelling book, extraordinary in its presentation of a pair of strangely doubled lives casting both light and shadow on each other, inevitable rather than gratuitous or sensational in its outcome. The relation between Lucy and Alice, unique and somehow paradigmatic at once, remains haunting and resonant long after the story is ended.
— John Hollander
This book is an astounding first novel from a very daring and dedicated writer. Home for the Summer is what the art of fiction has always striven toward.
— The New England Review of Books
Home for the Summer is a striking novel. Its strong original voices tells of a murderous girl who sees through the falsity of social surface with a kind of mad clarity. And it tells the story of murder itself in language that is austere, ironic, and forceful.
— Paula Fox
The premise for “Home for the Summer” is arresting: what happens when an intelligent but violence-prone teen-age girl comes home from a mental institution to discover that her family’s old equilibrium has changed?
— Chris Goodrich, The New York Times
