During his summer vacation, twelve-year-old Terrence befriends Lucy, a girl who claims to be a bat, and finds himself an unwilling accomplice when Lucy runs away from home
Sarah Withrow started writing her rollicking pre-/post-apocalyptic road trip novels in 2021 after retiring from a 17-year career as a Communications Officer.
From 1998 to 2007, she published four novels for young adults and a baby book. Her YA book Bat Summer, was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award and has been published in seven countries. Her short stories for adults have also appeared in several Canadian literary journals during this first kick at the can. (None of these stories have cell phones in them.)
Sarah lives in Kingston, Ontario with her luxury-sized cats Gloria and Melman. In addition to writing dystopian novels, she enjoys coffee, walking, yoga, cooking, TikTok and non-serious crafts.
Bat Summer was one of those books you just wanted to skip pages of.
But when I finished reading it, I realise how it was half decent. It was a fairly average story about a boy, and how he meets an unusual girl who thinks she’s a bat.
It’s a nice, touching story. The one thing that irked be about this, was how I was twelve years old when I read this, and so were the characters. Yet, I found them annoying and immature at that time –because, really, we need to grow up.
If the characters were seven or eight, I could handle it. However, this wasn’t the case.
Overall, now that I’m thinking about it, it was a nice book. It would’ve worked better if the author lowered the ages, though.