Summer Sisters

Judy Blume, author of numerous books for children and young adults and a couple of adult novels, straddles the latter two genres with SUMMER SISTERS. The listener is transported back to the moment two sixth-grade girls meet. Kate Reading can be childlike or sexy, innocent or manipulative, as she realizes their different natures. Her breezy retelling of nearly twenty years in Victoria's and Caitlin's lives as "summer sisters" gives no pause to the book's separation into parts, which can be confusing. Still her rendition of the troubled but true friendship is too juicy to leave until the unexpected ending. R.N. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

An intimate, confidential tone is essential to Judy Blume's story of two girls whose summers together form an unshakable bond even though their lives both begin and end so differently. Narrator Gish tells the story in a believable way; her youthful voice lightly glides through conversations between Vix and Caitlin and confides the narrative of their idyllic Martha's Vineyard summers, their adolescent crushes and more serious romances. Gish accentuates the intimate sense of a friend telling the listener the story. However, throughout the book, "voices" of different characters--brothers, stepmother, roommates, boyfriends--view the same events that the girls have just described. This structure gets muddled on audio because Gish doesn't distinguish the characters with enough vocal color. A modest success, but, overall, the brevity seems to make the summer all too short. R.F.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine