The Summer After June - by Ashley Warlick (Paperback)

About the Book

When her beloved sister, June, is murdered, Lindy abandons her hometown of Charlotte for the heat of the Texas coast and the chance to leave her grief behind. She also does the unthinkable: she steals June's infant son.

Book Synopsis

Ashley Warlick's critically acclaimed second novel, THE SUMMER AFTER JUNE, weaves a spellbinding tale of family and flight over the course of one feverish southern summer. Lindy Jain, a young, pragmatic, willful woman, is about to be married when her beloved sister June is mysteriously murdered. Lindy Jain then makes a desperate decision, fleeing her hometown of Charlotte -- her job, her fiance, her shattered family. She lights out for the heat of the Texas coast with the one thing that still ties her to her sister: June's baby son.
Suspenseful and sensuous, utterly compelling, THE SUMMER AFTER JUNE surpasses the enormous promise of Warlick's prizewinning first novel. "Ashley Warlick is wise beyond her years and gifted by a graceful insight not only into humanity's fears and foibles but also into its capacity to evolve, to be redeemed" (Oxford American).

Review Quotes

Ashley Warlick's first book, "The Distance From the Heart of Things" won Houghton Mifflin's Literary Fellowship when the author was just 23. It was the kind of success that some young writers have trouble living down. But Warlick's second novel makes good on and surpasses the promise of the first. Boston Globe

"THE SUMMER AFTER JUNE by Ashley Warlick is a strong, moving novel about a young independent minded, courageous, gritty woman who, in despair over the murder of her sister takes her sister's baby and leaves home in Carolina to make a new life for the both of them on the Gulf coast. Lindy is a fierce, honest, winning character and the life she makes with love, a romantic spirit and determination is a triumph. A wonderful read, a wise and redemptive story." -- Susan Richards Shreve, author of WILL OF THEIR OWN, THE GIFT OF THE GIRL WHO COULDN'T HEAR and PLUM & JAGGERS Booklist, ALA

"...Warlick, (whose first novel, The Distance From the Heart of Things, was praised for its maturity and eloquence) has more ambitious aims in mind: to illuminate the lives and hearts of those whom love has damaged, to discoer whether healing and transformation can occur despite, or perhaps alongside, the presumed finality of death....What sets the novel apart is Warlick's writing, quietly haunting, infused with a knack for the unexpected image and an understanding of the core of human nature, which subverts what we think we know of women like Lindy and men like Orrin and the complex choices they make in the name of love." -- January 16, 2000 -- By Paula L. Woods The Los Angeles Times

"...Warlcik's novel succeeds in tenderly depicting the mysterious bonds of love and family." The New York Times

"Ashley Warlick lives deeply in the beautiful and carpentered sentences she uses to write her books. THE SUMMER AFTER JUNE is even better than THE DISTANCE FROM THE HEART OF THINGS, which was one of the best first novels of the past ten years. Warlick does that most uncommon thing: she grows better and deeper with each book." -- Pat Conroy

"Stories about starting over again, about self-discovery, have a tendency to veer off into sentimentalism. Not to worry. This is not one of those aimless tales of truck-stop gurus and long-winded philosophical asides delivered while searching for the self." The Chicago Tribune

"The nexus of the heat-and-humidity index often produces novels of feverish isolation, and Warlick's second book falls into this category. When Lindy Jain's older sister, June, is murdered, her barely comprehensible reaction is to light off to Galveston, where she spent summers as a child, with June's baby boy in tow. Her attempt to re-create her happy girlhood includes romancing an old family friend, camping out in her grandmother's crumbling house, and refusing to talk to her mother. There is an overabundance of incident here, but Lindy's convoluted responses to almost everything around her are so well drawn and so intimate that her breath practically riffles the pages." February 14, 2000 The New Yorker

"...the haunting tale of one woman's heartbreaking journey into the many realms of love, confirms Warlick's talent, first glimpsed in her debut THE DISTANCE FROM THE HEART OF THINGS..." Publishers Weekly, Starred

"There's plenty to like and admire about this book." The Baltimore Sun

"Warlick writes with sometimes breathtaking maturity in a voice eloquent with knowledge and understanding" The San Francisco Chronicle

"The writing is lovely and languid, with past and present seamlessly drifting back and forth. The physical settings in steamy Galveston are described so vividly that the bright sun could almost make you squint." USA Today

"At 25, grief-stricken, Lindy Jain kidnaps her murdered sister June's baby and flees a nursing job and fiance in Charlotte, N.C., to hide out in the empty house in Galveston, Tex., where the girls visited their grandmother every summer. Adding to her angst is an unexpected pregnancy of her own, and a budding love affair with a summer playmate grown into a sexy landscape gardener. Warlick (whose acclaimed debut, The Distance From the Heart of Things, won a Houghton MIfflin Literary Fellowship) has written a sensual, moody love story that occasionally wilts beneath its own intensity, as heavy and huid as the Gulf Coast Heat. B" -RJ Entertainment Weekly

"Warlick brings to her fiction an extraordinary talent for persuasive storytelling, plumbing the depths of her characters and evoking the subtle pull of family and place." Newsday

"After the brutal murder of her sister, June, Lindy abandons her home, her career and her fiance in Charlotte, steals her dead sister's baby son and heads for her grandmother's huge, empty house on the Gulf Coast of Texas. In spite of a sometimes shaky plot--which includes a hurricane and an affair with a childhood friend with seccrets of his own--the story is compelling. Warlick's first novel, "The Distance From the Heart of Things" (1996) woon the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship when she was only 23. Not yet 30, Warlick is impressively confident with lush, emotional prose: "She would stretch her heart like a rubber band until it snapped, and then she would start over, all the way over, from the inside out." -- January 23, 2000 Atlanta Journal Constitution

"Lindy's desire to escape-to float away from the pain and emptiness she's felt since June's death-runs through Warlick's many long and lyrically structured sentences. By describing Lindy's thoughts even more closely than her actions, Warlick allows readers to share the character's responses to the sudden transformation of her world and to understand her motivations. 'There are parts of Lindy's mind that don't necessarily meet, ' Warlick writes, 'one thing not always leading to another.' Yet despite this, Lindy carries on-and most readers will follow thanks to Warlick's deft and compelling rendering of character." February 6, 2000 Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"A writer of enormous talent and wisdom. Warlick's fiercely independent voice may be the best literary news in a long, long time." Cleveland Plain Dealer

null Midwest Book Review

"June is dead. For Lindy Jain, that changes everything. Lindy often encounters death in her work as a nurse at a large Charlotte Medical center, but one day the face she encounters is heart-breakingly familiar. An intruder has murdered her older sister, June. Rather than wait for grief's slow erosion, Lindy decides to make a clean break from her own heart's turmoil. She kidnaps June's baby and flees Charlotte, leaving no explanation for her parnts or fiance. She and the baby land in Galveston, where the two sisters spent childhood summers visiting their grandmother. While thre, Lindy reconnects with Orrin, a constant third in those early adventures with June. Through Orrin's eyes, LIndy reconsiders her desperate views on life and love--eand even on those "simple summers" in Galveston. In the end, she, like the reader, learns that events are rarely as they first seem." Southern Living