Summer In The Land Of Skin (Red Dress Ink)

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Summary: Finding herself in Bellingham...
Review: Anna Medina is a lost, confused, and utterly depressed 25 year old SF data entry clerk. With the help of her friends, she goes in search of her dead father's long lost luthier friend. Her mission? To learn a trade and to help her father die another death. She meets some wayward locals and through her experiences with them, her icy emotions begin to melt and she emerges a new and fresher creature.

This is not a typical "boy-meets-girl" kind of story. Anna is broken, as are the people around her. Gehrman adds enough hippie references to keep the story interesting but doesn't overkill and make the plot cheesy. We sympathize with Anna and admire her willingness to help herself and help those around her. This is a great story--not sappy, not over the top, but one that will touch your heart as you long for a gin and tonic.

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Summary: A Woman at Odds with Herself
Review: Gehrman has given us a character-driven first novel that by taking a rawer-than-usual look at the longings and fears of twenty-something women breaks standard chick-lit rules. Still, this edgy, sometimes painful examination doesn't go so far as to alienate the reader from the main character and her search for meaning and understanding of events that have sculpted an as-yet-unrealized human being during her less-than-ideal 25 years of living. Set in Bellingham, Washington and with no shortage of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll to color the action, Summer in the Land of Skin takes readers on a largely internal exploration of one young woman's reactions to her suicide-victim father, her over-protective mother, an understanding guitar-maker older man, a sexy musician, and a new best friend whose head is screwed on even less straight than her own. Though it is sometimes hard to reconcile why Anna would be drawn to someone as mean-spirited and unrepentant as the mercurial Lucy, her groping to find her own sense of equilibrium makes for a penetrating study into the mind of a young woman at odds with herself sexually, emotionally and philosphically while still gamely seeking to discover where her true ambitions lie. Gehrman is fully in command of description and metaphor and has debuted a literary career that promises to give future readers even more deep and revealing glimpses into the female psyche.

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Summary: Not A Cindrella Story
Review: Gehrman's first novel was a surprise from this publisher. If the reader expects to read a Cinderella story, she will be surprised to find an edge to the story and the characters. Anna, a gritty, modern young woman, takes charge of finding herself, and along the way meets other characters who are much deeper than those found in other typical chick books! Lucy, Anna's friend, is down right mean sometimes, smoking too much and leaving her lover to visit other men. Lucy and Anna visit Lucy's mother and step-father in Sequim, and the reader is introduced to a seamy, unkind way of life. There are dark suspicions of things unspoken. In the end Anna finds her way to her father, her mother and her own sense of self. Some of her meanderings remind me of Annie LaMott's book Traveling Mercies. Gehrman has talent; she shows her education with detailed and beautiful language. I can't wait to read her next book.

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Summary: movie soon?
Review: I was very impressed with Jody's first novel. I feel as though I've spent a few days in Bellingham myself and am looking forward to another trip soon. I was given this wonderful book by a friend who said it was the best book of the year. I have to second that. When is the movie?
Robert Cooper
Middlefork, CA


Rating:
Summary: not your normal chick lit
Review: If your looking for the predicting, romatic chick lit book Red Dress Ink is giving us a normal bases then this book isn't for you. In many ways it had no point and it left me wondering where my 4 days went. It had annoying characters that had major issues. Like someone said before, this isn't a character that you can look up to.

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Summary: Cheap Trick
Review: Reading chic lit I expect the main character to be a woman who I admire and can identify with. In Jody Gehrman's novel I was disappointed.
The main character, Anna Medina, is admirable only in so far as she is contrasted with the other main character, Lucy. The author hates her character Lucy so thoroughly that it brings to mind black face minstrel shows. Throughout the lengthy novel Lucy is assigned every despicable trait imaginable which lends the reader to believe that the best haters of women are women. Not how I want to spend my day off.

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Summary: A mesmerizing, poetic, very good read
Review: Skimmed through this at Barnes and Noble (the cover caught my eye) and couldn't put it down. Ordered it a couple of weeks later and finished it just recently. One word: Wow! What an impressive debut and what a passionate and thoughtful writer Jody Gehrman is. Summer in the Land of Skin is a vivid, honest, painful, imperfect, and wonderful read. I hadn't heard of the Red Dress Ink books before; shame it is getting the "chick lit" rep because it is so much more, complicated and edgy, a true novel. Below is one of my favorite passages, I love it:

"We can never really know what people contain. Their hearts are like sealed boxes. We shake them, trying to gauge by the rattling sounds they make what secret treasures or broken pieces might be in there, but guessing is as far as we ever get. We have to live with the uneasiness of our ignorance, knowing only that we're vast and combustible, shifting, mostly hidden, probably f***ed up, but alive and mysterious while we last."

The main characters - Anna, Lucy, and Arlan - are alive and mysterious, and their stories are simple yet heartbreaking. I'm glad I discovered this book on a whim. It's great. Read it if you get the chance!


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Summary: A real trip of self-discovery
Review: Summer in the Land of Skin became a transcendental trip for me. A trip to a State I've never been, but real all the same. Jody Gehrman takes the reader, along with her main character, on a journey of self-discovery, one that isn't compromised by fairy tale endings and magical revelations. But one of truth and searching which rings home to this reader.

The characters became so real that I'm left searching at the end of the book for more information about their lives:"Lucy remained in Washington to eventually take a college correspondence....". Along with Anna, I also became enamored with Arlan. Gehrman's analogy is musical in its substance and drifts into your mind like a memorable melody. Thank you, Ms. Gehrman for giving my mind a vacation this summer.


Rating:
Summary: Look Closer
Review: Summer In The Land Of Skin follows the quest of Anna Medina to wake up, put down her binoculars, and actually live her life instead of living it through the people she watches through her beige apartment window in San Francisco. Her expedition starts in Bellingham, Washington to which she moves to learn the truth about her father's suicide while learning his trade of making guitars.

This book forces the reader to look deep into the hearts of it's characters as they are presented, to look far beneath the surface. Gehrman does an excellent job presenting the characters with just enough clues to let you figure them out for yourself. Summer is a very accurate character study of the 25 year-old; a sonorous depiction of the inner struggle between the drive for success and the devastating fear of failure. Her characters want so badly for their dreams to come true, but are far too afraid that they won't to even dare believe they will.

The quirky sense of humor, intense characters, and emotional plot make this book hard to put down. And after the last page, Gehrman's language is so well-crafted and her images so vivid that the impact they create last long after. Overall, I had to give this book five stars because I read it all at once and then had to go back and read my favorite parts all over again. I can't wait to read Gehrman's next book, Tart.


Rating:
Summary: Interesting Characters in beautiful prose
Review: This is a unique story of a girl coming of age. It shows you how she comes out of her shell through her relationship with very interesting characters. And it is all told so beautifully. Great read for anyone of any age interested in initiation themes.