This summer's secrets by Emily Barr

In a 2008 prologue we see young mothers, Felicity and Jenna relaxing on the lawn with their two year old daughters, Clementine and Senara, on a rare sunny day in Cornwall. All seems fine until little Senara starts digging in the garden and Felicity explodes, angrily shouting at the toddler to stop digging there. Jenna gathers her daughter up and goes home, vowing never to go there again. Fast forward to the present and three local Pentrellis sixteen year olds, Josie, Gareth and Senara, are outside the mysterious, vacant Cliff House grounds planning to fly a drone over as part of Gareth’s media project. When the drone crashes they climb over the fence to retrieve it, scaring themselves with stories of ghosts and zombies. When Senara finds a bone in the camellia bushes she has a feeling of déjà vu but the others just want to film themselves with the bone to add drama to the video. Senara leaves and finds the drone but she also finds old Mrs Roberts, the scary lady in the caretaker's cottage but instead of calling the police she has Senara make her a cup of tea and they become friends. The narrative slips back to 1940 when Violet Roberts picks ten year old evacuee Martha Driscoll as one of four London children to live in Cliff House during the war, a huge house which seemed to the children like a castle. The story switches back and forth between time periods, the next being 1988 when the mothers from the Prologue are sixteen. Felicity and her brother Alex live in Cliff House and when their parents go to Paris for the summer holidays, Felicity’s best friend Jenna comes to stay and they plan a party. The story shifts between the generations, Martha from 1940, Felicity from 1988, and Senara’s first person account from  the present, always with the Cliff House as the focus and an undercurrent of menace from things left unsaid. There are a lot of characters in this book and it is hard to keep track of them, especially as the same characters appear in different timelines and take on different roles at different times.  Constantly shifting the timeline requires a degree of repetition which interferes with the pace of the book and I sometimes lost the thread as to which 16 year olds were planning a party especially as there was not much happening in between. There were a few nice character studies and I liked Senara’s synaesthesia, but the love stories near the end seemed tacked on and the great mystery of who or what is buried in the garden was not enough to make me keep reading.

Themes: Friendship, Mystery.

Sue Speck