Review: Invincible Summer by Hannah Moskowitz.

Posted March 31, 2011 by Rowena in Reviews | 4 Comments

Main Character: Chase McGill
Love Interest: ??
Series: None
Author: Website|Facebook|Twitter|Goodreads

Noah’s happier than I’ve seen him in months. So I’d be an awful brother to get in the way of that. It’s not like I have some relationship with Melinda. It was just a kiss. Am I going to ruin Noah’s happiness because of a kiss?

Across four sun-kissed, drama-drenched summers at his family’s beach house, Chase is falling in love, falling in lust, and trying to keep his life from falling apart. But some girls are addictive….

This is going to be a hard review for me to write because I’m kind of torn on how I feel about it. On one hand, I enjoyed it enough that I finished it but on the other hand, I can’t really say that I was thrilled with the content of the book. I will say that the blurb for this book is very misleading because I thought I was getting one kind of story but I got something entirely different. I wonder if I should be annoyed about that but I’m not. I thought this book was going to be about a forbidden love. You know the kind where you fall in love with your brother’s girlfriend and don’t know what you’re going to do about it?

Well, this wasn’t one of those books. This book was about summer. It was about the summer tradition of going to the family beach house with your family year after year after year. This book follows Chase McGill as he goes back to the beach house summer after summer. He’s the second from the oldest kid in the McGill family but he should have been the oldest. His older brother Noah is a runner, he comes and goes when the mood strikes him and in the summer, the mood strikes quite a bit. Chase is attached to his older brother and hates/worries when Noah takes off. After Chase, there’s his younger sister Claudia who is my daughter Brenna’s age (11) and acts like she’s my niece Chloe’s age (20) and then there’s his youngest brother Gabriel who is deaf. The book follows the McGills to their summer home over the course of a few summers and it shows them dealing with life. Dealing with life where two parents fight all the time to life with a deaf younger sibling and life with an older brother that disappears for days/weeks at a time. There’s a reference in this story about Chase and how he should have been named Stay because he’s the brother that stays.

This book is real and it’s raw and it’s disturbing. The McGills summer with their summer neighbors, the Hathaways. The Hathaways have three kids around the same age as the McGills and the kids are all friends. Noah and the oldest sister, Mellinda have a romance that rekindles every time they’re back in town for the summer and Chase has a little something with the middle sister, Bella and is really good friends with Bella’s twin, Shannon (who is a boy). This book takes you behind the scenes of the “perfect” family. The McGills were just like the blurb for this book…very misleading. Chase thinks that everyone around them thinks that his family is perfect, he doesn’t like people looking at them like they’re such a cute family because their family is not perfect and in a lot of ways, their family is broken.

The whole Chase and Mellinda thing was never okay for me. I never thought, “Oh okay, well it’s okay because Chase needs her or she needs him” For me, flat out, their relationship was wrong. Noah’s reaction to the whole Chase and Mellinda thing rang false to me because Noah had an ongoing relationship with Mellinda that lasted years, not just a mere few weeks and for him to react the way that he did just didn’t feel right.

Then there was the whole waitress thing with Claudia which I couldn’t for the life of me understand. Why was she acting the way that she was? If it was explained in the book, it totally went over my head. Claudia was a likeable character though so I wasn’t too annoyed with that storyline.

I’m really confused with my thoughts about this book so if this review makes no sense, I apologize. Moskowitz told a story that was at times disturbing but you won’t be able to stop reading this book. Did I enjoy it? Not really but I couldn’t put the book down. My enjoyment level for this book was around a C but I am glad that I read it.

For all my Moms out there, I’d give this book a rating of:

For language, adult material and lots of summer behavior.