Don’t Let Summer Days and Summer Nights Pass You By!

Last week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was on short stories, and I was drawn by Summer Days and Summer Nights.  It was recommended by more than one reader.  Fortunately, they had a copy at the library that I just happened to be going to that evening.  So I picked up the book and decided to read all of the wonderful stories inside.

One of the things that I found interesting about this book is that it had books by authors that I was already familiar with, like Veronica Roth and Cassandra Clare.  The book also has several stories written by authors that I had heard about, but hadn’t had the chance to read before.

I was originally planning on reviewing Throne of Glass today, but since we’re in the middle of summer now and the season is flying by, I postponed that review until September.  Maybe by that time the library will have some of the other books in that series available for me to read.

Summer Days and Summer Nights has a wide variety of genres of stories to choose from, written by authors that tend to write in a variety of different styles.  Some you might like more than others.

In addition to different genres, there are different kinds of relationships represented here.  Some end up happy, some sad; some stories involve same-sex couples, others involve people of color.  Representation seems to be a big deal today in the bookish world; while you can’t represent everybody in twelve stories, it’s not a completely white, straight collection of stories.

Here are some of my favorites:

• “Inertia” by Veronica Roth:  I don’t think there’s anything that she’s written that I didn’t like, including this short story (okay, I didn’t like chapter 50 of Allegiant, but I try to pretend that never happened).  I was crying at the top of page 202 (I read the 2016 hardback edition).  I actually had to stop reading for a minute to just cry.  It was just so lovely.  And sad.

   

  “It was a good story, right?” he said.  “Our story, I mean.”
  “The best.”

  I’m tearing up just reading and writing those lines.  Oh, and there were a few more pages after this one.  The ending was wonderful too.

• “A Thousand Ways This Could Go Wrong” by Jennifer E. Smith:  This was a lovely story about a girl who had a crush on a boy with Asperger’s all year at school, and then finally runs into him during the summer and plays basketball with him.  Will things change when she finds out that he has Asperger’s?  You’ll just have to read this story.  It’s really sweet.
• “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” by Lev Grossman:  This is another sweet story.  In this story, our POV character is reliving the same day, August 4th, over and over again, like in Groundhog Day.  At the end of the story, we find out why he had been living the same day over and over and over again, and it’s just perfect.

Summer Days and Summer Nights was a wonderful collection of stories, written by a lot of authors that you are probably familiar with.  I hope you get the chance to check this one out before summer slips away.  I enjoyed these stories so much that I already hope to review its companion book, My True Love Gave to Me, on December 6th.