The Summer Of Impossible Things by Rowan Coleman (book review)

In ‘The Summer Of Impossible Things’, Luna is struggling to understand recent events and decides a trip into her mother’s past might help. She just doesn’t think that her trip to New York in 2007 will see her slip through time into the summer of 1977, where she will if she can attempt to rewrite the past.

1977 is the summer that the movie crew ‘Saturday Night Fever’ came to town and Luna’s father meets her mother. He is an official photographer for the movie and she happens to live in the area. A summer of love. But something happens in that summer that colours their lives and that of their children. Luna is in a unique position to find out what unless she gets distracted by a love of her own.

This is a fun book with a serious undertone as it looks at how our lives can be shaped by events that will never leave us. Luna is a 30 year-old whose own life has been affected by a trauma and she thinks she might be going mad when she revives her childhood gift of seeing people and places who don’t exist.

If author Rowan Coleman was watching ‘Quantum Leap’ with the rest of us, it certainly stirred something inside and she also wants to ‘put right what once went wrong’ leaving us with a real buzz at the end of ‘The Summer Of Impossible Things’.

This is a gorgeous and joyous book which has just enough of a serious edge to give it more weight than the average love-fantasy. I was drawn in by the time travel aspect but I enjoyed the whole thing which Coleman does more to resolve than the average ‘Doctor Who’ timey-wimey experience. It’s not for everybody but it does have a feel-good factor that makes it worth seeking out for summer.

Sue Davies

July 2017

(pub: Ebury Press. 432 page hardback. Price: £12.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-78503-241-7)

check out website: www.eburypublishing.co.uk