Saturday Review: “Growing Gracefully” a review by Amber Knox forthcoming in NCLR Online Fall 2024 of Karen Jones’s The Summer of Grace (2022).
In her Young Adult novel, The Summer of Grace, author Karen Jones “crafts a heartbreaking and heartwarming story about the traumas of the past and the strength of family, in all forms.” Setting her story in the 1950s in rural North Carolina, Jones “addresses issues of family, race, and community” in ways that are both thought provoking and emotionally cathartic.
The novel also presents an ancestral mystery that draws in the audience just as much as it does the main characters. The family, in typical Southern fiction fashion, are haunted by the ghost of their uncertain and tragic past. As the missing aspects of their family’s history become apparent to them the main characters, Jane and Gracie, begin to “dig into the complex history of their community and their family, determined to uncover the truth” in the hope of healing lingering wounds. As Knox states in her review the relationships in Jones’s novel “are at times heartbreaking, but in each other these characters manage to find comfort and a chance to heal.”
Read the whole review here while you wait for the release of the rest of the Fall 2024 issue coming out this October! And buy a copy of the book here or at your local independent bookstore.
