This is essentially an old-fashioned novel, because it is nourishing. It leaves a good taste in the mouth. It is spiced with wit and laced with vitality—everybody in it is glad to be alive—yet its basic ingredients are those two fundamental to a good story: courage and love. This is a book to read aloud, to lend to friends, to reread, and to treasure. One Summer In Between is a vital story, rich with detail. Harriet Brown is mischievous, thoughtful, wicked, pert, acidly charming, and made, certainly, of the stuff-that-endures.—Gwendolyn Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
Melissa Mather Ambros, was an author and documented her families' story of moving to rural Vermont, in her gripping memoir called the “Rough Road Home”. They became homesteaders and raised cows for milk, cultivated beautiful gardens and grew some infamous potatoes! Excerpts from her book were featured in a series of Saturday Evening Post articles in 1958.
She was born Nov. 12, 1917, in Chicago, to Arlisle Mather Brown, an English teacher, and Alfred Bruce Brown, an electrical engineer. She launched an exceptional academic career in Montclair, N.J., where she and her sister, Mary, and brothers Bruce and Ted enjoyed an idyllic childhood. She graduated from high school at 15 and pursued a degree in English literature at Oberlin College, from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1939. The following three months she toured England by bicycle, a solo trip that launched her lifelong passion for making and for touring beautiful gardens.
Returning to the U.S., she entered Tob-Coburn Fashion School in New York City on a full scholarship, and a year later, she took a job as a stylist in a department store in Baltimore. She met her first husband, Lt. Robert Lee Coughlin, at a dance at Fort Meade.
Read this in a Reader's Digest Condensed Book while vacationing at my Grandparent's and it remains the only book I've read that way that I insisted on tracking down and reading "right". It avoids most of the cliches that "The Help" apparently falls into -- the heroine is working as a maid, and the author is white, but there the connection ends. Harriet is a college student, she is in a possibly one-sided romance with a decent guy who always reminded me of Booker T. Washington, and the book is essentially her journal and thus her perspective. I have often wondered if this book works for a black person from the South; all the black people I have seen praise it are Northerners. Then again, although the heroine is Southern, the book is placed in the North (Vermont), and is not so much about racism as about people's similarities and differences.
Harriet is alone not just racially but culturally, and her employers are in some ways just as curious about her as she eventually is about them. She was employed not just as household help but in order to broaden the children's minds -- according to Maureen, one of the six children in the family Harriet works for, Harriet's predecessors were "a genius from Bennington who spoke German to the cows [and] danced barefoot in the orchard at moonrise" as well as "a soprano from Juilliard who used to sit on the barn roof and practice her scales -- it was marvelous, they echoed six times!"
The reader, like Maureen, will not find Harriet a disappointment in comparison. Maureen is interested in people -- they fascinate her. Most of the characters here are indeed pretty fascinating. Even characters who originally look to be both cliched and dull generally end up surprising you. It's a book about hope.
Well worth re-reading, if only for the dialogue. Like Richard Bradford's Red Sky at Morning, it's a novel where the people talk like you wish you and your family did, but both as an artifact of the civil-rights 60s and as an American coming-of-age tale, it's one of my guilty favorites.
I thought, Uh oh, a book about a black girl set in the mid 1960's - there'll be cliched story line all the way through. However, nope, it was a book of a girl coming to maturity of the mind. Harriet being only 19 seems naive yet her mind is always active in searching for what she believes is the truth. Her stereotyping of her own race and the whites, makes the story intriguing to see how she has to accept parts of herself as being wrong. Her mentor sends her letters in return whilst she is away through summer in Vermont with a white family, reminding her of her outbursts to him in her letters, are not warranted and she needs to keep the non-violence up no matter how poorly she is treated. Her anger is more within, than directed and she tends to become rather bitter at times, more at herself as she comes to terms with a world around her which is more foreign than anything she has ever known. A delight of a book; wonderful characters who you wish you could meet in reality; a novel I know will stay with me for a long time.
Since this was an older story, I was a bit concerned about the premise of this story. It turned out to be pretty good. I enjoyed it. I guess the overall lesson of the story, is that a person should be judged based on the content of his/her character and not on the color of a person's skin. It was a worthy read.
I thought it was incredibly boring when I first read it, but over time, the summer story stayed with me more than I expected. 1960s stories that deal with race tend to be hyper-focused on it, but this was just a black college girl from the south taking a summer job up north, and (if I recall correctly) it affected the story as befits the time period, but it was very much about her relationship with the family more than anything else.
Random memory: the part that sticks out most in my memory (and which I hope I'm not confusing with something else) is when she's trying to find some special hair care product meant for black women's hair, that she has a hard time finding in this region. It was a small but significant difference I'd never thought about before.