A review by girlonbooks
Hurricane Summer by Asha Bromfield

challenging emotional hopeful inspiring sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

🦋🦋🦋🦋 (four stars as rated in a butterfly pendant on a little gold chain)


Tilla's relationship with her father is complicated. He spends every summer on his home island of Jamaica, leaving her, her mother and her sister, Mia, behind in Canada for long stretches of time. When she and Mia are sent to spend the summer with their dad, Tilla hopes the months together will help them all to repair the damage done by his absence. But when nasty rumors begin circulating about her on the island, and with a hurricane barreling toward them all, Tilla wonders if it isn't already too late to salvage her relationship with her dad or even to enjoy what's left of her summer in Jamaica.

“I can’t help it. I succumb to the spell of Jamaica as the fantasy of who my father is radiates in front of me. My heart instantly wraps around him, and I forget every time he has broken it.”

Hurricane Summer was such an experience. I am overwhelmed by how much nuance and imagery this single story holds. This book is proof that we can sometimes learn just as much from fiction as nonfiction. The mentions of colorism and colonialism in particular were so poignantly and elegantly done that I could have spent a whole novel on the ins and outs of that alone. That plot though... I could feel it developing from page one - like a storm building on the horizon.

I am a sucker for the trope of "protagonist is wronged but the wrongdoers get their comeuppance in the end." It is just so darn satisfying when someone stops letting people push them around and establishes their worth. I loved witnessing TIlla and Mia's growth and the development of their character arcs as a whole. The respective scenes in which they both finally said their piece really were everything I wanted them to be. Also, I love when an author writes realistically about young adult emotions. For all her faults, for all her bad decision making, Tilla is just a teenager trying to sort through the trauma of her father's abandonment in a country where no one (besides Andre) has her back. I was proud of the way she grew in the end and that she didn't hold "the island" itself accountable for what she'd gone through. She was wise enough to understand the how and why of everything that happened over the summer and I think that's a level of maturity she wouldn't have demonstrated at the start of the book.

"When they ask how I weathered the storm, I will tell them I did not. I was uprooted like the palm trees and shot down like the birds from the stormy skies. I was ravished like the zinc houses and devoured like the soil as it swallowed itself whole. I was ruined. I was disaster. I was dancing in the eye of God’s will. “Thank you,” I whisper as we ascend into the sky. How beautiful it was to be destroyed.”

✨ Rep in this book: Jamaican and Jamaican-Canadian cast of characters, own voices

✨ Content warnings for this book: drowning, death of a parent, death racism, racial slurs, domestic abuse, violence, vomiting, sexual assault, abortion, infidelity, sexual content

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