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Summer Sisters

Summer Sisters

List Price: $7.99
Your Price: $7.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Classic Judy Blume, great story telling
Review: This is the perfect beach read book. I have loved Judy Blume's books over the years and this one was no exception.

Vix and Caitlin are friends who always spend the summer together. Vix is self-centered and selfish, Caitlin the more giving and sensitive partner in this friendship.

The ending was worthy of the story (but I'm not giving it away here) and it is enjoyable to follow this friendship as the girls explore love, sex, betrayal, and friendship loyalty.

This is an adult read, not for the younger set, and I think it is a classic example of Judy Blume's skill of great story-telling, coming of age exploration and looking within ourselves.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A moving story of true friendship and true love
Review: Once I began reading this book, I couldn't put it down. I laughed, I cried, and I related to so many of the events that took place in the story of "Summer Sisters". If your best friend has always seemed to be wilder and crazier than you and you have been envious of that, then you will enjoy this book. If you have ever met a man whom you perceived as unattainable, then you will love this book.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Enjoyable summer reading
Review: This is the story of Caitlin & Vix (Victoria), two young girls that met in Elementary school. Their friendship begins in 1977 when Caitlin invites Vix to spend the summer at her cottage by the ocean on Vineyard beach. Judy Blume takes us on their journey through teenage years right into adulthood. Friendships ; how often they can become bittersweet...to what length is Caitlin willing to go to find happiness ? Could she even betray her best friend ? Why can't she find contentment in her life? Why is it that even as adult we sometimes look for answers outside ourselves?

It's all about choices and how they affect our lives and the choices these two girls make are very different yet through thick and thin their frienship remains.
This book is about sisterly love and the real bound that exist when you have a true friend.
This was a great summer read for my vacation.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A non-trashy beach read
Review: I loved Judy Blume when I was growing up and I am delighted that she has some works aimed towards the adult crowd too. "Summer Sisters" is about Vix, a young girl who is invited by her classmate Caitlin, to spend the summer with her family at Cape Cod. Vix and Caitlin spend each summmer growing up together on Cape Cod, where they go through first jobs, first loves, and sexual experiences. Vix, who has an unhappy home life with her own family, enjoys these summers. But there is an undertone of female jealousy whenever she seems to pull ahead of the vivacious Caitlin.

This is a great little read, particularly if you are fmale and have a female friend close enough to be your sister!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A real thinker
Review: First off, I am a fantasy book addict. So this is not my typical choice of reading material, but this is my best friend's favorite book, so I figured I'd give it a try.
This is a book that is, for lack of a better term, real. It goes into topics like growing up, dealing with your family, encountering the opposite sex, dealing with friends and enemies, and even death. This is the type of book that makes your head hurt because you think about it too much.
I can read a good novel in one night, and this book didn't take me that much longer to finish. It is not a bad read and I at some points I didn't want to put the book down. I like how you get sections from each characters perspective. But the reason my rating is not higher is this book spans twenty years and I think they started to jump around too much. Towards the end, it seemed like everything was rushed just to finish the book. Also there were way too many characters introduced, only to never be heard from again. I found myself wondering who all these people were and I would confuse their names and have to go back to find out how they fit into the story.
The main characters, Vix and Caitlin, are very well done. I found aspects of myself in each girl, and other parts that were so totally opposite from me. I like how you could relate to many of the characters well.
Overall, if you like books on "life" this would be the book for you! If you like books that have nothing to do with "life" read some fantasy!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Summer Reading
Review: This is one of the best books I have ever read. If you are looking for easy summer reading I highly recommend this book. My friends and I took this book on a houseboat and all three of us read it within two days. It has everything you need and want in a book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Best by Blume!
Review: This latest novel by Judy Blume just blew me away. Summer Sisters is truly one in which I am going to go back to, and reread alot. In this book, Vix and Caitlin meet at a young age. Caitlin invited Vix to spend the summer with her and her rich family, and it turns out she would be spending more than one summer! I really liked the relationhip with Vix and Bru, that's probably why I liked the book so much. I didn't really like the side-characters that much, because they weren't in the plot too much and had bad development as the story proceeded.

Summer Sisters is a great read for teens and adults. I don't know why Judy decided this to be an adult book...it fits better decribition as a teen book. I highly recomend this to anyone that's mature, because there is some sexual content. This is an awesome read and I know you'll be rereading too!...

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: You got sand WHERE?
Review: I'd enjoyed "Smart Women" and "Wifey" -- so when I picked up "Summer Sisters", I was pleasurably anticipating a fun, witty, raunchy page-turner. I got one out of three: "Summer Sisters" is raunchy -- too raunchy for Ms. Blume's teen audience. Unfortunately, it's also too poorly written for adults.

"Summer Sisters" traces the story of two girlfriends -- who spend their summers at one girl's family beach house (hence the book's title) -- from puberty to adulthood.

This book has been criticized for its sex and vulgarity, which I don't object to as such. The problem with "Summer Sisters" is not that it's sexy and vulgar -- although it is -- but that it's really badly written. Really, REALLY badly written.

Regarding the two main characters: Caitlin (as mentioned elsewhere, her name is ridiculously anachronistic; character names in this book are implausible and/or sound like something from a soap opera) is a one-dimensional spoiled rich kid -- selfish, irresponsible, devoid of ethics. Victoria ("Vix"), is a one-dimensional noble poor kid -- virtuous, hardworking, toxically compliant -- lapping up Caitlin's ill-treatment without a peep of protest. Vix and Caitlin are both so stereotypical and irksome that I couldn't manage the least shred of feeling for either.

But simply making Vix a meek martyr and Caitlin a selfish brat wasn't enough to designate them "Good Girl" and "Bad Girl". Bad girls in popular culture only express their "badness" by acting out sexually -- never by poisoning pigeons or robbing a bank or littering -- so in classic time-honored fashion, Vix is "good" because she's sexually repressed, and Caitlin is "bad" because she's sexually liberated.

This is outdated, sexist nonsense -- if it was ever a valid delineation to begin with -- but it's particularly lacking in believability given that the girls come of age in the 1970s, the most sexually freewheeling era in modern history, when anything was allowed except saying No. It would have been completely unrealistic to have Vix remain a virgin throughout the story -- to say nothing of the fact that the book would have sold considerably fewer copies -- but Blume nearly "succeeds". Vix and Caitlin start out with the same curiosity about sex as many preadolescents -- they even fondle each other, apparently to titillate pedophile readers -- but once Vix reaches dating age, Blume relentlessly forces her to walk the straight and narrow.

Caitlin, in contrast, takes the experimental attitude that might be expected of someone who matured sexually in the 1970s. She gives free rein to her impulses, having sex for fun, adventure, or curiosity. Caitlin's thoughts/motivations are never so much as glimpsed (despite the fact that minor characters get long rambling monologues), but she seems to have a brisk, no-nonsense attitude about sex, rather than smothering it in mysticism and sentiment. We're obviously supposed to think that Caitlin's sexuality, unmitigated even by the obligatory guilt-ridden hand-wringing, marks her as dissolute and self-destructive; and conclude, when she meets her inevitable bad end in a see-it-coming-a-mile-away "surprise", that it serves her right.

Von and Bru (see previous comment about character names), fit right in with the program. Von, Caitlin's boy-toy, is a twentyish construction worker who jumps into bed with anybody willing. Bru, Vix' boyfriend, is also a twentyish construction worker, but -- unlike Von or the horndog construction workers that we women encounter in real life when they yell crude remarks at us -- he's in love with Vix, wants to marry her, waits years until Vix is ready to have sex, etc. So, Caitlin can have all the no-strings sex she wants, but has to be the "bad guy"; and Vix can be the "good guy" so long as she never falls off her pedestal. Terrific.

A particularly nasty bit of class bias surfaces when one of Von's trailer-trashy girlfriends, Starr, (I must admit that, in this case, the cheesy name works -- can't you just *see* her shag haircut and batwing eyeliner?), complains that Vix and Caitlin were off-limits at sixteen, whereas the boys she dated at sixteen expected her to provide sex. It's supposed to be self-evident that being sexually exploited is all Starr deserves; and that she clearly isn't entitled to the same safety and respect as a girl from a rich family like Caitlin, or a hanger-on to a rich family like Vix.

There are far too many other characters, most with no discernible purpose. They marry, divorce, meander in and out of the story at random (some of them are introduced once and then disappear) and wander off on story threads that are then dropped and never mentioned again.

Eventually, Vix marries' somebody; after awhile I stopped even trying to keep track of who everybody was' who's described as, "The greatest love of her life' everything that happened before seemed irrelevant" Bru, who was in the same state as Vix for two months of each year and knew her for ten months total, gets the whole book -- he can't kiss Vix without Blume describing it in detail -- and the schmoe she marries gets *one sentence*? That's it for "the love of her life"? Granted, the entire ending is rushed and has a tacked-on feel, i.e., "And then they all fell off a cliff and died, The End" -- but the discrepancy is particularly glaring here. If she's so madly in love with What's-His-Face that Bru is rendered irrelevant, how come Bru gets three hundred times as much ink?

This isn't a book, it's a first draft. Sure, I wish I'd had a gorgeous hunk madly in love with me when I was in high school. And sure, I wish I'd had a friend whose family was willing to bring me to their beach house every summer AND pay my way through Harvard. But it wasn't worth slogging through 400 tepid, clumsy pages to read about.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great read
Review: One of my favourite books of all time, one of those books where you find something new in it every time you read it. Judy Blume writes in a deceptively simple way, but her characters are stunning complex, as is the case with her young adult novels. Although it may seem like it's merely a book about two friends who fall in love with the same man, it's really about their tumultuous friendship. It's about Vix (Victoria), a smart girl from a deprived background, whose entry into the privileged world of Caitlin Somers will change her life forever. Blume doesn't hold back as she describes Vix's infatuation with the intriguing Caitlin, her desire to be a part of the family, her adolescent crushes, and her acceptance of Caitlin's betrayals. From early on, there are hints that Caitlin is troubled, and foreshadowing of what is to come. The story takes us through eighteen years in their lives, with the majority of the book taking place from Vix's point of view, although interspersed with first-person vignettes from the emotionally rich supporting characters like Vix's parents, Caitlin's family, and a few of the romantic interests. Although marketed as an adult novel, Blume's strength (as in 'Smart Women') is in capturing the teenage years perfectly, and is best read as a young adult book with more honesty and less censorship.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Addicted
Review: The relationship between Vix and Bru is what really got me addicted.This book is brilliant. I couldnt put it down.
Part two would be delicious!


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