Product Description

It's 1984 and one of the hottest summers Yorkshire's seen. It's the kind of woozy heat to lose your mind in. Mona is fifteen years old. She's a drinker, a thief and a fruit machine addict. Things are already going badly in the pub where she lives with her obese step-brother PorkChop. But when Mona meets posh Tamsin Fakenham, a sassy girl with beautiful breasts, an actress mother and a sister who's died of starvation, things very quickly get much worse...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #559482 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In her debut novel, My Summer of Love, Helen Cross has crafted a highly original and often shocking tale of two 15-year-olds spending one long, hot summer together. Mona is a heavy drinker, a fruit-machine addict and aspiring criminal, while Tamsin is a spoilt, rich girl, living in her parents' luxurious country home on the posh side of town. Although hailing from opposite ends of the social spectrum, both girls are victims of parental break-ups as well as, it would seem, suffering recent bereavements. When Tamsin's parents are away, Mona moves in and together the girls embark upon a wild relationship that is both beautifully romantic and shockingly violent. Set against the backdrop of a Yorkshire town in 1984, the text is seasoned with well-chosen motifs of the period: references to the miners' strike, the fear of nuclear attack, New Romantic fashions and the spectre of a serial killer on the loose.

It is this authenticity and humanity that separates this novel from other familiar coming-of-age tales. While novels covering this ground are often refracted through a lens of cosy, middle-aged nostalgia, My Summer of Love doesn't flinch from communicating the sheer awfulness of the girls' antics. As disturbing as the denouement is, the whole story is shot through with a black humour that, while not diminishing the sense of horror, conveys the teenage condition in all its embarrassing absurdity. Mona's obsession with removing bodily hair, Tamsin's weird culinary concoctions and their drunken attempts at dancing all rekindle cringe-inducing recollections of that period in your lives. Disturbing and funny in equal measure, Cross has succeeded in creating two vibrant and distinctive characters who linger in our memory long after the last page has been read. --Jane Morris

Review
1984 and 15-year-old Mona is a drinker, a thief and a fruit machine addict. Things are going badly in the pub where she lives with her obese step-brother but when she meets posh Tamsin, a sassy girl with beautiful breasts, an actress mother and a sister who dies of starvation, things quickly get very much worse.A highly charged and critically acclaimed debut novel.

ELLE
'Will fly off the shelves...a shockingly disturbing tale of teenage antics gone wrong one long hot summer.'

Customer Reviews

Teenage angst
Set in Yorkshire, Cross's novel explores the strange and terrifying world of two teenage girls who spend the summer of 1984 hanging out together. Mona is 15 and lives in a pub with her father and his girlfriend, Cleo, and Cleo's son, Porkchop. Struggling to come to terms with the death of her mother the year before, Mona's self-esteem is virtually zero. She gets through her days drinking vodka and other spirits on the sly, playing fruit machines, doing the odd bit of thieving and dreaming of "sexual allure". When she meets Tamsin, a spoilt rich girl whose sister recently died of anorexia, she finds the friend she has been so desperately looking for. While coming from opposite ends of the spectrum, the two girls forge a relationship based on alcohol, eating disorders and shared grief. It's a weird friendship, bordering on the obsessional, and it soon becomes clear that they are not only a danger to themselves but to the safety of others outside their delusional realm. I'm still not sure whether I liked this book or not. It is certainly very dark and sometimes comic. But it's the girls' relationship - twisted in a "Heavenly Creatures" kind of way - which is the most disturbing. Aside from this, Cross has done a superb job in recreating the 1980s, and the description of the sizzling summer and the Yorkshire market town in which Mona lives is so evocative you can almost smell the rawhide factory and feel the sun's burning heat.

Beautifully written
I read this after reading Helen Cross's second book, The Secrets She Keeps, which I really loved. This is great too. It's beautifully written, full of dreamy images, humour, deftly drawn characters and stays with you long after you've finished it.

Strangely Haunting
This was a strange book. There's no doubt that Helen Cross can write and the idea for the story was a good one, that certainly intrigued me and kept me reading until the end. I didn't think it was as shocking as 'Clockwork Orange' though, infact in some ways the violence seemed tame, but maybe I've been watching too much TV!
However, having said all that, I find myself strangely haunted by the book and some of the scenes. The hot summer really pervaded every page, adding to the sense of oppression and imminent disaster. So although it had its faults, on the whole it was well-written and I enjoyed it (I think!!)