Weekend Pick for June 2, 2023
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Check out our weekly suggestions!
Are your students looking for book recommendations?
Send them to browse through the picks for this or past years.
For the picks from 2022 click here
For the picks from 2021 click here
For the picks from 2020 click here.
For older picks click from 2019 click here.
For the even older picks click here.
Happy June and Happy Pride dear readers! Our pick to kick off the month is debut, Stonewall and William C. Morris Honor novel, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet by Jen Ferguson. In a discussion on the novel, Ferguson shared that in reading YAL after a long academic journey through her doctoral degree she came back to life, and this novel certainly offers both an incredibly complex storyline and wildly stubborn hope.
Sweetness and bitterness live side by side for Lou as she faces working all summer at her family’s creamery full of homemade oranges, blues, and yellows as well as her co-workers newly ex-boyfriend and former best friend. In this space, she feels confusion about her relationship with her ex who never made her feel passion, but rather discomfort while also trying to sort out a new relationship with previous best friend, King, who has returned to their Canadian prairie town after leaving without explanation three years earlier. As Lou begins to sort through her own identity and relationships, she receives a letter from her biological father–someone she hoped would stay away and behind bars for the rest of his life.
Though friendship and healing bring Lou closer to herself and to King, her father’s requests (demands) to meet her become more insistent. She knows she cannot meet him, but when her family business comes under threat, Lou knows she cannot ignore him forever. Drawing together issues of intergenerational trauma, the spectrum of human experience, and how we fight to heal ourselves and each other, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet is a beautifully resonant and sticking story. Lou’s journey exemplifies her observation that, “Sometimes you need one person–and sometimes you need all your people with you” (Ferguson, 342).
Sweetness and bitterness live side by side for Lou as she faces working all summer at her family’s creamery full of homemade oranges, blues, and yellows as well as her co-workers newly ex-boyfriend and former best friend. In this space, she feels confusion about her relationship with her ex who never made her feel passion, but rather discomfort while also trying to sort out a new relationship with previous best friend, King, who has returned to their Canadian prairie town after leaving without explanation three years earlier. As Lou begins to sort through her own identity and relationships, she receives a letter from her biological father–someone she hoped would stay away and behind bars for the rest of his life.
Though friendship and healing bring Lou closer to herself and to King, her father’s requests (demands) to meet her become more insistent. She knows she cannot meet him, but when her family business comes under threat, Lou knows she cannot ignore him forever. Drawing together issues of intergenerational trauma, the spectrum of human experience, and how we fight to heal ourselves and each other, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet is a beautifully resonant and sticking story. Lou’s journey exemplifies her observation that, “Sometimes you need one person–and sometimes you need all your people with you” (Ferguson, 342).
As always, please take care as you read and find Jen’s letter to readers and content warnings here. Until next time, keep reading!
Cammie
Cammie
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