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Library | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Condie, A. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | J Fic Condie, A. 2016 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Salem Main Library | TEEN Condie, A. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stayton Public Library | JF CONDIE | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A tender and compelling contemporary novel for young readers about facing loss and finding friendship, from Ally Condie, international bestselling author of the Matched series.
Nominated by the Mystery Writers of America for the 2017 Edgar Award
"Kids are awesome. And they are diverse. There are children with different abilities and backgrounds and experiences, and every one of them deserves to find themselves in children's literature and to know that they matter." -Ally Condie, on Summerlost
Sometimes it takes a new friend to bring you home. It's the first real summer since the accident that killed Cedar's father and younger brother, Ben. Cedar and what's left of her family are returning to the town of Iron Creek for the summer. They're just settling into their new house when a boy named Leo, dressed in costume, rides by on his bike. Intrigued, Cedar follows him to the renowned Summerlost theatre festival. Soon, she not only has a new friend in Leo and a job working concessions at the festival, she finds herself surrounded by mystery. The mystery of the tragic, too-short life of the Hollywood actress who haunts the halls of Summerlost. And the mystery of the strange gifts that keep appearing for Cedar.
Infused with emotion and rich with understanding, Summerlost is the touching new novel from Ally Condie, the international bestselling author of the Matched series that highlights the strength of family and personal resilience in the face of tragedy.
"Generous and bittersweet, Summerlost has the emotional acuity of Ms. Condie's writing for older teenagers, but it's pitched just right for readers ages 10-14." - Wall Street Journal
"Funny, sad, sweet, and heartwarming." -Parents.com, Special Needs Now blog
★ " Condie is at her best . . . grabbing readers' interest from the first page." -- Publishers Weekly , starred review
★ "Thoughtful, poetic chapter endings guide readers new to psychological depth toward meaningful connections between plot events and thematic reflections." -- BCCB , starred review
"A nuanced portrait of grief deeply grounded in the middle-school mind-set." -- Booklist
"Honest, lovely, and sad." -- Kirkus Reviews
Author Notes
Ally Condie received a degree from Brigham Young University and worked as a high school English teacher. She is currently a full-time author. Her books include Freshman for President, Being Sixteen, and the Matched Trilogy. In 2014 her title, Atlantia made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-9-A year ago, Cedar Lee's father and brother Ben were killed in a car accident. This summer Cedar, her brother Miles, and their mother have come to Iron Creek, her mother's hometown. They've bought a home that they can live in during the summer and rent out to college students during the school year, and their mother is spending much of her time fixing up the house. Cedar is still grieving her family's loss, and soon small objects begin appearing on her windowsill, items that Ben might have collected. One day a strangely dressed boy rides by on his bicycle. Cedar follows him to the Shakespeare festival, where the boy, Leo, is working as a program seller. A friendship grows as they attempt to solve a mystery involving the death of one of the festival's most famous actors. As Cedar works through her grief, she also learns how healing friendships can be. Phoebe Strole provides subtle but distinct voicing of each character with an appropriate level of emotion and pacing of the story. VERDICT Middle grade students will relate to Cedar as she develops a new friendship, makes mistakes and corrects them, and takes her first steps toward becoming a responsible young adult. ["A first purchase for middle grade collections, particularly where realistic fiction and coming-of-age stories are in demand": SLJ 12/15 review of the Dutton book.]-Ann Brownson, Eastern Illinois University Library, Charleston © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Connie (Matched) strikes a deep emotional cord with this coming-of-age story about 12-year-old Cedar Lee, who has moved to Iron Creek, Utah, for the summer with her mother and younger brother, Miles, as the family struggles to regroup after an accident claimed the lives of Cedar's father and brother Ben. Cedar quickly meets enterprising, offbeat Leo, who gets her a job at Summerlost, the town's yearly Shakespeare festival. As the new friends team up to give (unofficial) walking tours about the life of legendary actress and hometown hero Lisette Chamberlain, they become captivated by the circumstances surrounding the woman's death. Condie is at her best in this foray into middle grade fiction, grabbing readers' interest from the first page while creating memorable characters struggling through deep emotional pain. The thread of Lisette's mystery is intriguing in itself, but Leo and Cedar's unlikely friendship steals the show. Their adventures, set against the quirky backdrop of a community of personality-rich theater creators, make for a summer with plenty of good to remember along with the bad. Ages 10-up. Agent: Jodi Reamer, Writers House. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
After twelve-year-old Cedar's father and brother are killed in an accident, she seeks distraction at a theater festival. There she befriends Leo, who introduces her to legends surrounding a famous local actress's mysterious death. Their investigation is compelling, but the strongest impact comes from the characters' personal struggles and honest interactions, which keep the story feeling authentic right up to the thoughtful conclusion. (c) Copyright 2016. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A year after losing two family members, a girl spends the summer in a small town with a Shakespeare festival. Mom buys a summer house for herself, 12-year-old Cedar, and 8-year-old Miles in Iron Creek, where Mom grew up. It's been a year since a drunk driver killed Cedar's father and other little brother, Ben. As Cedar gets a job selling concessions at the Shakespeare festival, makes a friend named Leo, and finds herself and Miles obsessed with a morbid soap-opera arc on TV, Condie touches everything lightly but deftly with the family's grief. Leo and Cedar researchand give unauthorized tours abouta long-dead, famous actress from the town; Cedar's pulled by that research because she knows, now, that things can disappear forever. Ben was disabled (maybe autistic), and their relationship was sometimes difficult. Her relationship with Miles is stolid and understatedly touching. Details are careful and never extraneous; there's a reason it matters, at a certain moment, that "the milk was perfectly cold and the bananas not too ripe" in a bowl of cereal. Despite indicating that Cedar bonds with Leo because they're both outsidersshe as a biracial Chinese-American, he for vaguer reasonsan explanation for their friendship isn't necessary. Although Cedar's narration as a character of color is largely convincing, white is still the default for other characters unless otherwise specified. There's no monumental grief breakthrough, nor should there be: this is the realistic going on, day by day, after bereavement. Honest, lovely, and sad. (Fiction. 10-13) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Condie makes her middle-grade debut with a tender novel about a family coming to terms with a personal tragedy. The summer after Cedar loses her father and brother Ben in a car accident, her mother moves their family, now just three of them, to Iron Creek, Utah, home to the Summerlost Shakespeare Festival. Cedar finds an unexpected friend in Leo, a theater nerd obsessed with Lisette Chamberlain, a famous actress who made her start at Summerlost before dying young. In their time off work at Summerlost, Leo and Cedar run unauthorized Lisette Chamberlain tours while trying to piece together what really happened to her. The mystery of Lisette plays second fiddle to the novel's centerpiece: the special friendship between Cedar and Leo, which helps Cedar deal with her grief. An aching sense of loss pervades the story, focusing more on Ben than on Cedar's dad. Though it is never named in the story, readers will put together that Ben was on the autism spectrum. A nuanced portrait of grief deeply grounded in the middle-school mind-set. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Banking on the popularity of Condie's Matched series, her publishers are welcoming her middle-grade debut with some hefty promotion, including an author tour.--Barnes, Jennifer Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"MY DAD USED to say that life was like turning the pages in a book," Cedar Lee, the 12-year-old narrator of "Summerlost," tells us. '"Oh, look,' he'd say, pretending to flip the pages in the air after we'd had something bad happen to us. 'Bad luck here on Page 97. And on 98. But something good here on 99! All you had to do was keep reading!"' After the death of her father and younger brother, Ben, in a car accident, Cedar and the other surviving members of her family are still turning the pages, searching for ways to cope with their grief. Her mother buys a summer house in Iron Creek, Utah, the desert town where she grew up, and throws herself into building a new deck - something she never would have done before the accident. Cedar's 8-year-old brother, Miles, eats Fireballs obsessively, testing his ability to endure pain by leaving them in his mouth until tears run down his cheeks. Cedar mopes in her room, watched by a vulture roosting in a tree outside her window, until she meets "Nerd-on-a-Bike" Leo Bishop. Leo has a job, in costume, as an Elizabethan peasant selling concessions at the town's famous Summerlost theater festival, and he helps Cedar get hired, too. The job, and her friendship with Leo, entices Cedar from her room and distracts her from her sadness and anxiety, if only temporarily. Leo is working to earn money for a trip to London to see his favorite actor play Hamlet, but Cedar doesn't know what she'll do with her money. There's nothing she wants. To increase their earnings, Leo and Cedar open a secret side business, the Lisette Chamberlain Tour. Lisette, Iron Creek's most famous native, got her start as an actress at the Summerlost Festival, became a movie star and died mysteriously at the Iron Creek Hotel. Leo and Cedar lead tourists through the landmarks of her life, reciting juicy biographical tidbits. Cedar is determined to learn more about the circumstances of Lisette's death and the whereabouts of her missing wedding ring - not only because the information will add to the appeal of the tour, but because the mystery torments her. She may dread facing the death of her loved ones, but when confronted with the death of someone she never knew, she is compelled to search for answers. Reminders of her father and of Ben, who was "special" (he seems to have been autistic), continue to strike pain in Cedar's heart. Eerily, objects that only Ben would have liked begin to appear on her windowsill: a small screwdriver, a purple toothbrush, a folded-up map. Who is leaving these things for her? Leo? The vulture? Or perhaps the ghost of Lisette Chamberlain? Yet another mystery to solve. This is the first middle-grade novel by Ally Condie, the author of the best-selling Matched series for teenagers, and she has a gift for expressing complex feelings in clear and lovely images that younger readers can grasp. "Sometimes I thought of the three of us as pencils with the erasers scrubbed down to the end," Cedar says of herself, her mother and Miles, "and the next swipe across the paper would tear through the page and make a scree sound across the desk." Cedar has a dream about Ben that is both moving and spooky in its simplicity. "Ben stood in front of the door and wouldn't let me in because he wanted to talk to me. 'Blue T-shirt,' he said. 'Gray pants. Orange sneakers.'" Cedar had forgotten what he was wearing when he died, until he comes to tell her in this dream. "'Blue T-shirt,' he says again. 'Gray pants. Orange sneakers.'" She wakes up crying. Some revelations near the end of the book are perhaps too surprising. Cedar uncharacteristically steals something valuable for reasons that never quite add up. She also admits to having resented the extra attention Ben got when he was alive, but this confession comes late in the novel and doesn't have the impact it seems to demand. It might have added extra depth to Cedar's character to see her struggle more with her mixed feelings and her guilt, along with her grief. Even so, "Summerlost" is swift and entertaining. It reverberates with feeling. After a summer spent grappling with the mysteries of death, Cedar comes to accept that some questions can never really be answered. All we can do is live with the people we love, and love them back while they're here. NATALIE STANDIFORD'S most recent middlegrade novel is "The Only Girl in School."