LIFE WITHOUT SUMMER

LIFE WITHOUT SUMMER by Lynne Griffin

From the back of the book:

Tessa Gray's life changes forever when she loses her four-year-old daughter, Abby, in a hit-and-run accident outside her preschool.  As she grapples with a terrible grief, made worse by the police's insistence that the case in unsolvable, she finds her only solace in Celia Reed, the grief counselor her husband has pushed her to see, and in the journal she's begun keeping, where she compulsively counts the "days without Abby" and maps out her plan for catching the driver who tore her family apart.

Celia struggles to keep Tessa from getting caught up in a bleak crusade for answers, but she finds that their sessions open the door to emotions she's spent years ignoring, forcing her to face the rising tensions in her own life - her troubled teenage son, her alcoholic ex-husband, and her fragile new marriage.  Celia soon begins to realize that she must come to terms with the tragic mistakes of her own past and the choices that have led her family to the brink of destruction.  

Life Without Summer is a haunting portrait of two women whose  lives converge unexpectedly when the answers one needs turn out to be the other's only chance for peace.

I had mixed feelings reading this book.  It was written in two voices, Tessa and Celia.  At first it seemed to be mainly about Tessa and her feelings about Abby's death and her search for the truth about what happened.  But then the focus of the book seemed to turn to Celia and her troubles and she became the main character.

Throughout the book, I didn't like Celia.  She seemed too uptight and rigid to be of any help to her patients.  Her home life was a wreck.  I especially didn't like her new husband, Alden.  He was a totally pompous jerk. I couldn't understand how a person like Celia, who was supposed to be a smart woman, could kow-tow to someone like Alden.  But the ending of the book made me take a second look at Celia, slightly changing my opinion of her.

This was a book that made me think.  How would I have handled the situation had I been in Tessa's shoes?  Or in Celia's?  I think Ms. Griffin did a good job writing about a hard subject.