Book Review: The Myth of Perpetual Summer

The Myth of Perpetual Summer by Susan Crandall


I think I got this book free from Audible, and I haven’t had stellar success with their free gifts, but this wasn’t too bad. It’s one of those “woman returns to small town of her youth so we have twin stories of the modern day and the childhood she left behind” mysteries. There’s a sort-of romance with an implausibly perfect man who has apparently held a torch for her forever, and a lot of exploration of the culture of a small southern town, and a few mysteries.

The mysteries felt a little clunky. Some of them weren’t really mysteries and some of them were kind of dangled in the middle and then solved in a perfunctory manner when the bad guy says too much. Then there’s the mayhew jelly mystery, which I felt was just kind of left hanging. She made a big deal about the mayhew jelly, but it didn’t seem to play that significant a role. And the whole story of how her brother came to be arrested and the events leading up to it felt like they could have been more interesting than the book that the author chose to write.

But I think the reason the author chose to write this book is because they wanted to say something about mental illness. Because if you take away the clunky mysteries and the implausible romance and the disjointed family crimes, the real story is how her father’s mental illness, and the stigma against it, damaged everyone in their family. To that end, I think it succeeded well enough.




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