Summerlings: A Novel

by Lisa Howorth Narrated by Michael Crouch

Overview

It's the summer of 1959 in the seemingly tranquil suburbs of Washington, D.C. But our young narrator, John, and his best friends, Ivan and Max, know the truth: every door on their street could be hiding*an escaped*Nazi or a spy with secrets about the A-bomb. The*entire city*is being plagued by an inexplicable spider infestation-surely evidence of “insect warfare” by the Russians! So when a rare vinegaroon-a whip scorpion-is discovered on Capitol Hill*and sequestered for*study at the Smithsonian, the boys, along with their tomboy accomplice, Beatriz, hatch a risky midnight plan to steal the*deadly*creature for their own devious purposes.
*
Yet when the friends discover some very real instances of anti-Semitism and prejudice in the neighborhood, it's the shocking and tragic*events stemming from*a*well-intentioned community-building potluck party that change their lives forever.
*
A vibrantly voiced,*heartfelt, and charming Cold War coming-of-age story,*Summerlings*captures the crystal-clear moments that mark the bittersweet reckoning of childhood's end.

Editorial Reviews

SEPTEMBER 2019 - AudioFile

This audiobook is for fans of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Mick Kelly, and other stories of kids and adventures—some frivolous and some perilous and tragic. Narrator Michael Crouch captures the spirit of the novel by providing just the right level of enthusiasm for the characters, who include three pals and a tomboy, Ukrainian émigrés, and a possible Nazi sympathizer. The story takes place when the Cold War was ever present and WWII not a distant memory. A plan to steal a poisonous insect to get back at a neighborhood bully and to help a young woman who’s in an abusive relationship makes for a unique coming-of-age story. Throughout his narration, Crouch conveys a longing for a simpler time when things really weren’t that simple. J.P.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

NOMINATED FOR THE MISSISSIPPI ARTS AND LETTERS AWARD

“As a boy my first literary hero was Tom Sawyer, and ever since I’ve enjoyed the misadventures and romps of kids loose in the summertime. Summerlings is a story rich in local color, humor, outrageous characters, and with a wicked plot.”
—John Grisham, author of The Reckoning

“Summerlings is a manic, finely wrought, compelling dash, that transports the reader back in time to an America (sweet-hearted, wide-eyed) that feels like a lovely, lost foreign country, lost to us in this dark national moment.  Howorth is a joyful writer who charms the reader with her command of detail and her precise nostalgia."
—George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo

“An engaging coming-of-age story focused on the unraveling of truths hidden just beneath the surface…Howorth has a gift for crafting memorable characters and an authentic sense of place.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Nostalgic but unblinkered. . . . Entertainingly eviscerates the rose-colored notion of postwar tranquility.”
—Shelf Awareness

“Charming, impeccably detailed . . . a rare gemstone of a novel that proves both emotionally resonant and truly transporting. . . . A poignant exploration of childhood innocence as grand as the hopes of its delightful and motley cast of characters.”
—New York Journal of Books

“Lisa Howorth is the real thing! Beautifully written, sweet and ultimately heart-breaking, Summerlings is the To Kill a Mockingbird of the Cold War generation.” 
—Julia Claiborne Johnson, author of Be Frank With Me

“Lisa Howorth’s writing is a total joy and Summerlings weaves a generous web of Bazooka gum, Miracle Whip and Cold War paranoia. I so envy her ability to spin the fine details of childhood into a powerful and memorable story like this one.” 
—Sloane Crosley, author of Look Alive Out There

"Lisa Howorth’s Summerlings practically hums with feeling and memory. One can nearly hear the clang of the Good Humor truck, the buzz of the gnats on sweaty summer necks. Funny, poignant and ultimately deeply affecting, it will transport you, move you, take your breath away."
—Megan Abbott, author of Give Me Your Hand

“Put this novel in whatever is today’s new equivalent of a time capsule – maybe an amygdala implant with a barcode that can be easily scanned?  I read it in one gulp, remembering my childhood in Washington, D.C. with pleasure and pain, totally engrossed, astonished, disconcerted, to feel so young again.  It’s so real.”  
—Ann Beattie, author of A Wonderful Stroke of Luck

"Lisa Howorth’s Summerlings might masquerade as a coming-of-age story—a small pack of boys in 1959, their unhappy DC home lives, the Ukrainian woman they all adore—but in reality it’s so much more. To read this book is to be transported to another era, one both otherworldly yet instantly accessible thanks to Howoth’s incandescent and evocative prose. The experience is akin to falling into someone else’s memories and never wanting to leave."
—Hannah Pittard, author of Visible Empire

SEPTEMBER 2019 - AudioFile

This audiobook is for fans of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Mick Kelly, and other stories of kids and adventures—some frivolous and some perilous and tragic. Narrator Michael Crouch captures the spirit of the novel by providing just the right level of enthusiasm for the characters, who include three pals and a tomboy, Ukrainian émigrés, and a possible Nazi sympathizer. The story takes place when the Cold War was ever present and WWII not a distant memory. A plan to steal a poisonous insect to get back at a neighborhood bully and to help a young woman who’s in an abusive relationship makes for a unique coming-of-age story. Throughout his narration, Crouch conveys a longing for a simpler time when things really weren’t that simple. J.P.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169182835
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/06/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

I

For us boys, the summer of 1959 was as cataclysmic as a meteor. Washington’s historic plague, our wild neighborhood party, and my first acquaintance with death—these are the things I remember so vividly from that bright season, along with the accompanying feelings of fear, revelation, and wonder.

I was eight, the time in life when everything is still new, and some things are perceived clearly but others are murky and not understood—that is to say, those things in the realm of adults. What my friends and I knew was a grab bag of information overheard, along with information we made up and told one another and accepted as fact. Not really so different from the grown‑up world, I suppose. We existed in a smaller world of our own daunting challenges, peopled with gods and monsters. Sometimes they were the same.

 
It was a scorchingly hot summer. Maybe the record-high temperatures had something to do with our plague. But Washington summers are always fairly hot; the city is built on a swamp, after all. What were L’Enfant and Banneker thinking? Paris, I suppose. Wide diagonal boulevards, circles, obelisks, bronze and granite heroes—but built on marshy land where cattle once grazed.

The city grew like a swamp, too. Our neighborhood, just over the District line near Chevy Chase Circle on Con­necticut Avenue, was lushly green in summer, even deep into August. Connors Lane, originally just a farm road, was jungly and mossy—Virginia creeper and ivy grew on houses, grass grew from cracks in the sidewalk and street. Few people had perfectly tended yards, or exotic nursery specimens from Johnson’s Flowers or American Plant Food. What grew was what was used to growing: boxwoods, dogwoods, oaks, holly and yew, maples and mulberries, and, of course, the iconic cherry trees, although they weren’t indigenous and had been given to the city of Washington by the Japanese government in 1912. My mother told us that when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, an angry mob set the cherry trees at the Japanese embassy on fire. But cherries thrived all over the city—their delicate pink blossoms so very lovely in spring, giving our stolid, stony city a lighter feel, like a frill of petticoat peeking from under a nun’s habit. In our old neighborhood, steps and walks crumbled and mold grew on walls. We didn’t worry about things like mold back then; we worried about polio and radioactivity. The big oaks created a dense canopy on our lane—a tunnel where we boys foraged and loitered and ran amok like the little beasts that we were. The light under the canopy gave everything a dark, watery green cast in summer, a green not like any of the greens in my new box of sixty-four Crayolas.

 
Connors Lane had been part of a large farm established in 1848 by two Irish immigrant brothers of that name. The farm had been sold, although a remnant of the family still lived down the lane, toward Western Avenue, where most of the newer houses were. Some of those new houses belonged to second-generation Jewish couples whose parents or grandparents had escaped Europe before the Holocaust. My grandfather said our neighborhood, because it wasn’t part of the more “hoity-toity enclave” closer to Connecticut Avenue, was one of the few places in Chevy Chase where Jews were allowed to live, which I didn’t understand but was told not to talk about. Our end of the lane, close to Brookville Road, consisted of mostly older houses of assorted vintages. My grandmother called us the “Whitman’s Sampler” because our neighbors were all so different, and from “somewhere else.” Other countries, but also from other places in the U.S. Not unusual for the Washington area, but, looking back, it was unusual for most of America. We certainly didn’t think it was different then; as far as we knew, it was just like everywhere else. Everywhere else must have diplomats, government people, and refugees from one bad thing or another, is what we thought, if we thought about it at all.

In fact, our family were the oddballs—Washington natives, although, of course, originally we were from “somewhere else,” too. My grandfather Brickie’s grandfa­ther, a Schultze, had come from Germany (Brickie wasn’t especially proud of this) and made harnesses for President Taft’s horses. Poor horses! Brickie’s mother came from Limerick, and my grandmother Dimma’s people were from Philadelphia, going way back. I didn’t know as much about my dad’s family because he and my mother divorced when I was five or so, and things were not cordial between them. My sister, Liz, and I didn’t see our father often: the occasional dinner at O’Donnell’s Sea Grill, or the Touchdown Club, and we’d go with him to Rehoboth Beach for a few days every summer. Daddy’s family, Mannixes, were Irish, too, and Catholic—“mackerel snappers,” as the lapsed-Catholic Brickie said, and I did know that Daddy had worked with his father in real estate, but they’d had a falling-out over some slum properties my father didn’t want to deal with. He still hadn’t found a job. Brickie said my dad was allergic to work.

We called my grandfather “Brickie,” a nickname from his sandlot baseball days on the Ellipse, and because of his bright-red hair. His real name was John, same as mine. He worked down in Foggy Bottom for the United States Infor­mation Agency, writing broadcasts for Voice of America. He also helped create the Jazz Ambassadors program, sending famous jazz musicians around the world to make people like America. My grandmother Dimma’s name was a child’s corruption of “Dear Ma,” what her grandmother had been called. Dimma did lady things: played bridge, shopped for beautiful clothes, did a little charity work, and enjoyed the crossword puzzle in the morning Washington Post with her Chesterfields and Cutty Sark. She was still pretty, her hair a subtle gold, and she wore stylish cat-eye glasses to match. Brickie and Dimma came to live with us when my parents separated.

Our house was fairly modest, a three-story brick colonial built on the site of an old firehouse, with what my grand­mother called a “porte cochere,” and extensive gardens, where Brickie tended his peace roses, peonies, and annuals. The old stable where the fire engine and horses had been kept still stood in the backyard. When they moved in, my grandparents had taken the master bedroom, and my mother had moved into the attic room—at least until she left. Liz and I had our own small bedrooms, but now Liz, who, at almost thirteen, was a “problem adolescent,” was off at Camp Furman for the summer and would soon start boarding at Holton-Arms downtown, so I was practically an only child.

I was not exactly sure why my parents divorced. Look­ing back, I can see that Daddy was feckless and spoiled, and had trouble holding a job, and my mother was often depressed, and needed a lot of attention. They were both good-looking and wild, and they loved to drink and traipse off to Ocean City or Virginia Beach or New York. After their marriage ended, my mother contracted tuberculosis and had to go to St. Elizabeths, a hospital where there was a TB sanatorium—or at least that’s what Liz and I were told. Nearly two years later, she was still there, although she came to visit us every month or so. I missed both of my parents, particularly my mother, but I didn’t miss their fights. Divorce was lonely for children—there wasn’t a lot of it in the 1950s, and I sometimes felt like we were frowned upon by some people, but I followed Brickie’s advice and tried not to think too much about it, and waited impatiently for my mother to come back to us.

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