Everything feels just on the right side of fantastical, like a Tim Burton film.
By-the-Sea is an island town located somewhere off the Northeast American coast where it’s always cold, damp and gorgeously isolated. Most witch-centered novels are married to their aesthetic, and Summer of Salt is no exception. It is immediately apparent that Mary is, in some way, a tragic character with an inevitable ending, but Leno never gives that ending away easily. Mary is both deeply human and poetically inhuman, acting as a great foil to Georgina’s serious personality. Rather than the story being about Georgina herself, it felt more like Georgina’s ode to the island, to her friends and family, and, most importantly, to her sister. However, this ultimately worked to the book’s advantage. By the last page, it feels as though you don’t know her in any bone-deep way. Though there is an adorable romance between Prue and Georgina, it plays second fiddle to the relationship between Georgina and her family.Īt its heart, Summer of Salt is a seawater-soaked fairytale about two sisters on the cusp of adulthood, confronting both their desperate need to move away from their hometown and the realities of their own limitations.Īs is occasionally the case with novels in first-person point-of-view, Georgina felt like the least fleshed-out character. They come from a long line of magical women, and while Mary has inherited this magic, Georgina’s feet are rooted firmly on the ground.ĭuring this one last summer, even though death strikes the island, Georgina meets a beautiful tourist named Prue. Georgina and her twin sister, Mary, have one last summer to themselves on the island before they go off to different colleges and leave their childhood behind. The summer before college is a strange, stinging, magical thing. Over the course of her last summer on the island-a summer of storms, of love, of salt-Georgina will learn the truth about magic, in all its many forms. When tragedy strikes, what made the Fernweh women special suddenly casts them in suspicion.
No one questions the (allegedly) three-hundred-year-old bird who comes to roost on the island every year.
No one questions the weather, as moody and erratic as a summer storm. No one on the island of By-the-Sea would ever call the Fernwehs what they really are, but if you need the odd bit of help-say, a sleeping aid concocted by moonlight-they are the ones to ask. But with their eighteenth birthday looming at the end of this summer, Georgina fears her gift will never come.Īn island where strange things happen. Her twin sister, Mary, already shows an ability to defy gravity. Georgina Fernweh waits with growing impatience for the tingle of magic in her fingers-magic that has been passed down through every woman in her family. Katrina Leno’s Summer of Salt is a glimpse into a fascinating world reminiscent of ‘Practical Magic’, bittersweet and melodic in equal turns.Ī magic passed down through generations.
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