The Last Days of Summer by Vanessa Ronan

The Last Days of Summer by Vanessa Ronan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

She can forgive. They can't forget.

After ten years in the Huntsville State Penitentiary, Jasper Curtis returns home to live with his sister and her two daughters. Lizzie does not know who she's letting into her home: the brother she grew up loving or the monster he became.

Teenage Katie distrusts this strange man in their home but eleven-year-old Joanne is just intrigued by her new uncle.

Jasper says he's all done with trouble, but in a forgotten prairie town that knows no forgiveness, it does not take long for trouble to arrive at their door ...





Unfortunately I have found this book very hard to read and review.

This sounded just like something I would love to read, it is a slow burner, mystery and told from the perspective of 4 characters.

Jasper has been in prison and after a decade is being released, his sister Lizzie has two kids and lives on the outskirts of the town of her family, in her families house. Lizzies feels it is her duty to support Jasper, he has no one else. He could however now be a danger to her daughters, she reminds herself he is in the brother she used to know.

I had quite a few issues with this book, the first was the pace, it was so slow, I understand why this was the case, to help build tension. However when you work full time and only have half an hour here and there to get into a book it needs to have good pace, something that I feel this book was lacking.

Another gripe of mine is the fact this book had no chapters in, the points of view jumped around and we were reading from different characters perspectives but there were no chapters to break it up. This again made it hard for me to only read a few pages here and there, I also found when I picked the book up again I had to reread what I had already read, as there was no marker and I couldn't remember where I had got to.

I really, really wanted to love this book, from the blurb it had me hooked but unfortunately it didn't deliver for me. It took me weeks to get only half way through the book, there were pockets within the novel that I was really interested in, but not enough to make me want to race through it.

The book did pick up in the last quarter of it, but for me it was too late, I had been bored, I couldn't connect with the characters and by then I wasn't bothered what happened.

This is not a book that I would recommend, unless you have a large amount of time to get into it initially. Perhaps I would have felt differently about the book if I had that time to begin with.

I would like to thank the publisher for sending this in exchange for an honest review.