Title: The Fall of Summer
Author: Roz Louis
Publisher: Toplink Publishing
ISBN: 978-1948262811
Pages: 146
Genre: Christian fiction/Historical fiction
Reviewed by: CC Thomas
Hollywood Book Review
Roz Louis’s The Fall of Summer combines Christian fiction and a historical narrative, to present a character readers will wish had actually lived and who they had actually met. Summer Gram is just such a character. Her viewpoints are sassy and spirited and her outlook is one to perfectly match her name—full of warm feelings of hope and sunshine.
Summer was a child born into a loving and God-fearing household. Summer was also born to a black sharecropping family. As a child, Summer was precocious, and it didn’t take her long, even as a toddler, to see the disparity between her family and others she knows. She also saw early on the injustice of racial mores within her own family and culture and spoke out against it. She learned quickly that speaking out, even in her own tightly-knit home had dire consequences. Summer also quickly realized the hypocrisy which existed within her own religion. While claiming to promote fairness and love, her church seemed to emulate the hypocrisy she saw elsewhere. On Sundays, she couldn’t help but notice that the preacher always seemed to be dressed nicely with a full belly; however, when looking into her own home, Summer noticed her parents were leading a life trying to uphold social customs that didn’t make any sense to them or to their children. To her, their lives looked like a hopeless loop of endless, back-breaking work, Saturday night craziness, and Sunday piety. When she tried to speak to her own family, she was met with silence and threats.
What’s a girl to do? Some might learn silence when constantly told to hush. Summer, though, learned the opposite. To escape the jail-sentence of her own life, she pushed herself and excelled in school. Summer realized that education was the key to escaping the same life lived by her parents and she eventually even made it to college. Even there, at a place of “higher” learning, she still had to endure racial and sexual harassment and discrimination. But she still kept going, and going, and going.
While Summer can teach the reader many lessons, a faithful perseverance is the most inspirational one. When it feels as if Summer is about to be swamped by the realities of an ugly world, she turns to her faith and finds an inner strength and knowledge which pulls her through every circumstance. For those who want to be inspired and reminded of the beauty of their faith, Louis’s The Fall of Summer is a worthy read.