The Summer We Fell Apart: A Novel
by Robin Antalek
Harper Paperbacks. 384 pages, $14.99
THROUGH MOST of her life, protagonist Amy Haas was the dutiful daughter. It was she who welcomed a foreign exchange student into the Haas household the summer before graduation, even though it was obvious that Amy’s mother didn’t want Miriam there. Come to think of it, though, Marilyn didn’t want anyone around, even her children. When she was home—which wasn’t often—Marilyn sat in her room, smoking, leaving her children to raise themselves.
Sixteen months older than Amy, George Haas should have had complete control in his job, but he didn’t. Teaching teenage boys to love literature was hard when hormones, not Salinger, drove the class members to act. But when Asa Malik became a student at the private boys’ school,
Kate, the oldest Haas, had been Daddy’s Girl, which was a mixed bag. Richard Haas was somewhat distant, and Kate spent her entire life raising her siblings and yearning for her father’s approval. She hated that her brothers and sister were so needy—Why did she have to be their caretaker? She wasn’t their parent!—and she rushed to escape as soon as she could. Love, at that time, was surprisingly easy but her father had other ideas and Kate had more regrets than her heart could handle.
Was there ever a time that Finn, the second sibling and oldest brother, wasn’t drunk? Alcohol had been his best friend for a very long time. Amy had a hard time remembering him ever being sober, and Kate worried about Finn. Responsible Kate tried but could not fix Finn’s life. Neither, needless to say, could Finn.
On the eve of a happy family event—a rarity—Marilyn reflects on the legacy she left her children by being mostly absent throughout their lives. Still, they turned out to be fine adults. Over the years and the summers in which her children bonded without her, she missed so much. But, then, so did they.
What makes The Summer We Fell Apart a beautiful novel is its stellar characters—and the shimmering scenes it evokes to draw you into their lives as a participant. You find yourself really caring about the four Haas siblings, now that you understand how they became the dysfunctional adults that they are today, and you hope they’ll make it as they struggle through their lives. But the book ends abruptly without resolving any of the issues that they’re confronting. Whole story lines are left dangling. The characters that we’ve come to know are left in suspension, their plans and intentions untested, much less fulfilled. Robin Antalek has written a novel whose title suggests it’s meant for summer reading, but it’s a novel that falls apart, as it were, in the end.
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Terri Schlichenmeyer is a writer based in Wisconsin.
