This isn’t quite what I call “Chicklet-lit”. I define Chicklet-lit
as being Chick-lit for the next generation down – the generation that the book-publishing
and book-selling industries might define as young adult. Chicklet-lit novels are
always a fun, easy read yet are just one stroke more serious than what is
written for the more mature Chick-lit reader. Personally, I’m not the greatest
fan of them. I usually see them as competently written, following a formula that
satisfies and just a little unadventurous. But I’ve read Sarah Dessen before
and enjoyed her work. I was already familiar with her This Lullaby – which is in fact on my “further reading” list on one
of the modules I teach at the University of Salford, UK. So, although the cover
suggests Chicklet-lit That Summer is
really something a little different.
The novel totally absorbed me all the way through. Dessen certainly
maintains the setting that so frequently houses Chickletlit – comfortable middle
American life, girls interested in boys and young women who laugh and cry a lot
and suffer all the normal adolescent anxieties. Yet she uses a more lyrical prose
than one would normally find in a Chicklet-lit book. Just into the opening paragraph
we read “It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine,
fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms,
the steam rising while everything drips around it.” And we can totally identify with main
character Haven whom Dessen draws so well. She is rounded, complex and unusual.
My daughter remarked as we looked at the teen section in
Waterstone’s “I wish they’d had books like this when I was a teenager.” She is
now 30. And had there been books like That
Summer available when she was a teenager, I would have gladly bought it for
her.
