Speaking of Summer

I love this book because nothing is as it seems, especially Autumn, the unreliable narrator, who is searching for her missing twin sister, Summer, who disappeared in a way that defies all reason.

It kept me guessing until the very end. And even though the answer Autumn uncovers about what happened to Summer is completely unexpected, given the circumstances of Autumn’s life experiences, it made perfect sense. I thought about this book for a long time after reading it.

This book expertly navigates the topics of mental health and sexual violence, as well as the plight of missing black women,… show more.

Kalisha Buckhanon’s Speaking of Summer develops a major trope of recent disappearance-fiction by women: a search, sometimes a quest, involving two women who are close friends, lovers, or sisters.

But Buckhanon’s novel also experiments with an unreliable narrator, timely social critique, and some Dostoevskian madness. It’s also a novel of Manhattan: as in so many other disappearance-writings, geography (urban geography in this case) is a key element in the narrative as well as in the symbolic and thematic weave of the work.

By the end, the cumulative aspects of the protagonist’s life – her work, her art, her loves, her… show more.