"One Summer" Review

Since I did not know much about author David Baldacci, I pictured him to just be a novelist of thrillers and crime fiction. I was pleasantly wrong about that. In “One Summer” (June 14, 2011), Baldacci gives readers a moving, domestic fiction novel about a family falling apart, picking up the pieces and learning to love again after a tragic loss.

            Christmas is approaching, and patriarch Jack Armstrong is doing all he can to hold on until Christmas is over. He is dying from a disease doctors tell him is always fatal. Given mere months to live, he knows he will never walk his daughter down the wedding aisle, he won’t send off his middle child to college, and he will long be gone by the time the youngest graduates from high school. But he is determined to hang around through Christmas, living on an oxygen line and bedridden. He catches all the glimpses he can of his family: the love of his life, Lizzie; their daughter, Mikki, a rebellious 16-year-old who’s not close to her dying father; son, Cory, a 12-year-old thespian; and son, Jack Jr. (known as Jackie), who’s 2.

            Life throws them a major curveball when Lizzie dies in a car accident. The parent who everyone expected to be around suddenly isn’t, and Jack seems mere days away from being gone, too. Anticipating that the children will soon be orphans, Jack’s mother-in-law, Bonnie, splits up all three children and puts them with various members of the maternal side of the family (Jack has no living relatives). Jack is left in Cleveland to die alone without any family around, much to the dismay of Bonnie’s husband, Fred, and of course, Jack.

            Miraculously, Jack discovers he has started to breathe on his own again. Soon he’s trying to support his own weight without anyone’s help. Instead of going to hospice prepared to die, he works up to going to a rehab facility. His good friend, fellow military man and co-contracting business owner, Sammy Duvall, helps him train to gain physical strength back. As soon as he’s discharged, Jack goes to retrieve each of his kids, starting with Lizzie, who’s with her grandparents in Arizona.

            Jack struggles to balance time between working to support his family as a single parent and actually spending time with the kids. Sadly, he puts work ahead of the kids and almost misses Jackie’s birthday. He is reminded of it not-so-gently by Mikki, who clearly thinks he is failing as a parent. Jack is not even aware that Cory is being bullied at school until Mikki informs him of that, too.

            When Lizzie’s stylish, eighty-something-year-old grandmother, Cecilia Pinckney, passes away, Jack is shocked to learn that she has left him the old Pinckney house on the South Carolina coast. The house is referred to as ‘The Palace,’ and it is where Lizzie grew up. She had wanted to take the kids there for the summer, and Jack had never seen it, so in her memory, he packs up the family and heads to South Carolina. Sammy goes along as well and brings his dog, Sam Jr.

            Jack and Sammy find work in the small beach town, but Jack still struggles to primarily be a dad. He has also become obsessed with fixing ‘Lizzie’s Lighthouse’ as she had painted on a sign in her youth. And he has caught the eye of a lawyer-turned-diner-owner named Jenna Fontaine.

            “One Summer” explores the struggle that the Armstrongs (especially Jack and Mikki) go through to piece their broken family back together. There will be obstacles for all of them, one of which is big enough for Jack to wonder if his second chance with his family is prematurely ending. What will the outcomes be? How can he let go of Lizzie? Can he learn to love again?