The Summer Son
Craig Lancaster
ISBN 9781935597247
AmazonEncore
Copyright © January 2011 (Releases January 25th)
304 Pages
$13.95 Paperback
Mitch Quillen has been receiving phone calls from his estranged father, Jim, who Mitch hasn’t visited since he was a boy. With his marriage on the rocks and his lackluster job failing, his wife encourages him to get away and to find out exactly why his father keeps calling. The two haven’t seen eye to eye since the last summer Mitch spent with him as a boy, and even back then their father/son relationship was tepid at best.
Immediately, the two can’t get along as intensity and frustration builds between them. Mitch wants to know what’s wrong with Jim and tries to be sympathetic, but Jim won’t give in. He was raised as an abused orphan, served in the Navy, went through 3 wives, and was so verbally and physically abusive to his children that his oldest, Jerry, left. A lifetime of hardships still holds onto the stubborn man’s back.
The book alternates between two storylines: the last summer Mitch spent with his father back in 1979, and the present (2007) time when Mitch returns to his father. At first, the past really builds Jim up as a dispassionate hard working man. The characterization here is amazing and brutal. But the purpose here is vague after the older son, Jerry, leaves and joins the marines. The reader will find themselves being just as lost and confused as young Mitch is.
Our current situation in 2007 isn’t much better and rides on for 200 pages of arguments with Dad and phone calls to Mitch’s wife. When Mitch finds a box of letters in his Dad’s shed, it’s only then that the mysteries start to reveal themselves and both Mitch and the reader get the answers they’ve been searching for, giving truth to the old adage that what you don’t know can’t hurt you.
I had high hopes for this book. Lancaster paces his story nicely with dialogue that reads and feels true to his characters. The story is nicely paced in the beginning, but we lose ourselves in long boring days of Mitch working with his father, driving the truck to drilling locations. We constantly see the anger his father repeatedly expels upon his sons and his workers. In the present day, Lancaster puts us there in the awkward moments between Mitch and his father, but unfortunately neither will budge so nothing gets resolved or revealed until its almost too late. Like Mitch, I was even screaming at Jim, “Just tell me what’s wrong already?!”
As a boy who also wasn’t close to his father for reasons still unbeknownst to me, I could relate to Mitch, and I actually had sympathy for Jim. Jim is our true center to the story here and Lancaster shows us his pain through and through. But he leaves his characters back to back ignoring one another, or even face to face like angry bulls, for too long. Had Mitch discovered the mysteries of his father’s life sooner, and had to investigate them a bit more earlier on, the book would have exhibited more of the drive it desperately needs, and that it has in the last 100 or so pages.
As the arduous layers to Jim’s life are slowly revealed, by the time we get to the real reason he’s been calling Mitch, the reader will find themselves numb to it, and like Mitch, by then it’s too late to save the delicate balance that exists between father and son already. This is a good father/son story that we’ve heard before, or seen on TV, or even lived ourselves, which unfortunately makes the book a bit too predictable. It’s possible that Lancaster wanted to see just how much his characters could endure before they break, but ended up subjecting his readers to their own breaking point instead.
