Poolbeg Press
Paperback, 211 pages
ISBN-10 1842233467
ISBN-13 978-1842233467
Every summer Alice imagines her miraculous transformation from quiet little nobody to interesting and elegant individual. It hasn’t happened yet, but she’s still hoping. And besides, it keeps her from obsessing over her ex-boyfriend . . .
Every summer Lynn runs around doing a hundred different things. Drama, dancing, languages, music – she believes in making her summer holidays ‘worthwhile’. She’s never been the kind of girl to sit around wistfully waiting for her life to begin.
Every summer Chloe breaks someone’s heart. She doesn’t mean to, but it’s happened every year since she was eleven years old, and she’s not quite sure how to stop. The new boy in her life, she knows, is inevitably going to be her next victim.
This summer is going to be different. This is the summer that things are going to change for these three girls . . .
“… her best material yet… the characters are amazingly well developed … This is a book that you can get completely lost in – so much so that you won’t want it to end.”
(Laura Cassidy, Leinster Leader)
“… Hennessy has crafted a believable story about the dynamics, tensions and misunderstandings within friendship groups. This is quite a light read, but one that deals convincingly with real teenage concerns and preoccupations.”
(Helen Carr, Bookfest Recommended Reading Guide 2009)
“… Hennessy manages to create a reasonably authentic picture of Irish adolescence today… the characters are all entirely plausible… a light-hearted, easy and enjoyable summer read.”
(Siúan Pórtéir, Inis autumn 2009)
“This is a delicious, thought-provoking read that takes a good look at the awkward friendships and troubled, interlinking and potentially explosive relationships between its cast of late-teenaged characters… I highly recommend Every Summer to fans of Sarah Dessen, Sara Zarr, Sarra Manning and other authors who delve deeply and realistically into the psyche of characters in their late teens.”
(Luisa Plaja, Chicklish review)
Every Summer came out of one scene, which ended up being quite late in the book, involving Alice and her summer job, and spilled out into her two closest friends and what they were doing for the summer: the slightly bossy, multi-talented, achiever-girl Lynn, and the enigmatic Chloe, the girl who would be the one all the boys wanted. I wanted to write about something that happened during a summer (most of my books take place during school time), and I wanted to write about groups of friends where not everyone gets along equally and there are underlying tensions. Along the way, other stuff happened…
Things I have discovered since people started reading the book: Chloe and Alice are battling it out for ‘favourite character’ status while poor Lynn doesn’t even get a look in.
