Invincible Summer by Hannah Moskowitz

Release Date: April 19, 2011
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Pages: 336
Review Source: eARC from GalleyGrab for honest review

Synopsis: (from Goodreads)
Noah’s happier than I’ve seen him in months. So I’d be an awful brother to get in the way of that. It’s not like I have some relationship with Melinda. It was just a kiss. Am I going to ruin Noah’s happiness because of a kiss?

Across four sun-kissed, drama-drenched summers at his family’s beach house, Chase is falling in love, falling in lust, and trying to keep his life from falling apart. But some girls are addictive....

My Thoughts:
I have to say that this book just wasn’t for me. If you check out Goodreads there appear to be a lot of people who did like it, but I found it dry, with very little actually occurring. The synopsis on Goodreads made me think it was mostly about summer love and growing up, but I found the book to have a very different feel from all of that.

I didn’t connect at ALL with any of the characters, which is a huge problem for someone like me who reads for character. Chase just didn’t come alive as a character for me. I didn’t understand him or any of his motivations. To me it felt like I was looking in through a window, observing these people, yet not really having a clue what they were actually saying. It also disturbed me that Claudia was so sexualized at such a young age. Right from the beginning I wondered why Shannon, a 15 year old boy, would be obsessed with an 11 year old girl. At that age four years is a huge difference. It just felt dirty and strange.

The format of the book was also prohibitive to my enjoyment of it. Because the book takes you through four summers, you’re only able to get brief glimpses of time, but never actually the whole story. I wasn’t able to connect to the characters or feel anything about the plot, because it was all very patchy.

Finally, there’s the whole Camus obsession. To be brutally honest, it made me want to smash my head into a wall. Who quotes philosophy like that? It was so strange to read about teenagers quoting Camus verbatim like that. I could understand a quote here and there, but no, it was full, lengthy passages that they somehow knew off the top of their heads. It didn’t feel realistic at all, and it was also pretentious and boring, and after a while I skipped over all the passages.

I definitely recommend that you check out all of the positive reviews of this one on Goodreads. Who knows, maybe this will be a book for you. Perhaps it was just too literary for my taste, but I couldn’t make sense of most of it, and I really didn't enjoy it at all. I'm giving it a two because I could see glimpses of redeeming qualities in a couple of the characters, and because the writing was definitely strong.

Rating:


Find Invincible Summer by Hannah Moskowitz on Goodreads, Book Depository, & Amazon.ca