Summer Lightning by Roberta Silman is a dazzling new historical novel that tells the story of an immigrant Jewish family from the challenging prewar years all the way through to the Kennedy assassination. Silman’s captivating characters take risks as they strengthen their ties to those they left behind in Europe, and to the dazzling Manhattan art scene of the '50s and '60s, and the Black community. Award-winning audiobook narrator Carrington MacDuffie’s reading of Silman’s elegant prose is powerful and exciting.
Roberta Silman’s latest novel Summer Lightning is historical fiction at it’s finest. A meet-cute between two young people at an air field, in 1927, begins a story about the immigrant experience in the United States.
Belle and Isaac face many challenges, both interpersonal and socioeconomic, as they begin a new life, in a new country while fighting to maintain ties to their homeland and the family members left behind. As their story unfolds, painted by the external challenges of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and eventually, the Civil Rights Movement, Silman engages the reader with classic, vivid language. I was engrossed from beginning to end. Silman’s writing grabs the reader from the first and doesn’t let go. I finished reading, wanting more of these characters, in the best possible way.
I’d like to thank Meryl Zegarek Public Relations for a free advanced copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.
A fine family chronicle through the 20th Century, from the Lindbergh flight to 50's bohemia to the present day. History's ironies are strange, aren't they? What we took for granted yesterday is insane today and what's off the way yesterday becomes commonplace today.
I'm not sure that history is a cycle, necessarily, but I definitely think it's humans returning to their familiar places. It's like in psychology how we have a tendency to return to emotional states that are familiar even if they aren't good for us.
So, is that our character, on an individual level? And if that is what people tend to do historically, on a macro scale, is that human nature?