Coming Home

The Best Summer Of Our Lives by Rachel Hauck is the most beautiful Christian dual timeline novel that I savoured and never wanted to end.

This is a book about friendship. It is a coming-of-age novel. It is about love, which is the glue that binds people together. We see four eighteen-year-olds as they are determined to have the best summer of their lives. After a prank gone wrong, they find themselves as councillors in a summer camp for eleven-year-old girls. “What if the best summer of our lives isn’t about parties or shopping… but giving these girls a summer they’ll never forget.” It is a summer that will be pivotal. Lives will be shattered and new paths forged but the summer of 1977 will be in the minds of them all. “8 weeks, 8 Saturdays, and the summer of ’77 still defined her.” Everything hung on that summer. For the friends, and the reader, there is a gap of twenty years before the tale resumes in 1997.

The novel is written in the two alternating time periods and in four different voices. The teens are all easy to empathise with, easy to picture, and they all lodged in my heart.

Rachel Hauck includes a real-life murder event that rocks the girl’s world as the camp goes on lockdown for the summer in order to protect the innocent. They must all look out for each other. The reader can ‘feel’ the fear and apprehension.

All four teens are carrying secrets that are burdening them down. They need to open their hearts to each other, no matter what the consequences.

We all need God, whether we recognise it or not. There are some beautiful scenes with The Preacher. We see that He calls us each by name – will we answer His call? “ ‘You feel like you’ve been in a desert.’ She turned at the sound of His voice. The Preacher walked towards her… Part of your journey is to draw you to Me.” Jesus waits patiently for us to answer His call.

There is a beautiful moment when a character asks why there are so many empty chairs in the large tent. “Hundreds of empty chairs, waiting for the hurting, the sick and the lost, the broken to come.” God calls us to come just as we are.

All the teens are bound by a terrible accident, two years before the book opened. They are all grieving. “Why did it happen? Where was God?… She had a few more questions if He cared to listen.” In our hurt and our pain, we often cannot see that Jesus walks beside us. A character is angry at God and pulls away. “But she didn’t need God. Wasn’t He for the poor, the weak, the broken?” God is for us all. We are all broken and in need of a Saviour. “God, if there’s any way You care, if You see me at all, please, tell me what to do.”

Sometimes it can be years before we acknowledge our need for God but He waits patiently. “Are You there, God?… if He was listening, if He cared despite the life she’d lived, she’d like to start over.”

There is the theme of fathers. Sometimes our earthly fathers let us down but God will never abandon us. “Why would the God of the universe, who she could not see, want her, when the flesh-and-bone man who’d fathered her did not?” A character feels lost and abandoned.

We witness a teen in 1977 trying to come to terms with a surprise pregnancy. The reader is horrified by her mother’s response. “We’re going to keep this quiet… No one will ever know.” It seems a careless and old-fashioned attitude. Every child is a gift from God, no matter what the circumstances of conception. Each child is loved and known by God.

A character has a hard time liking herself. For twenty years she seems to have been on a merry-go-round trying to find something to satisfy. She has four friend-shaped holes and one God-shaped hole that only He can fill. “If He [God] loved her… why couldn’t she love herself?” She recognises “I’m so broken.” God does His best work with broken vessels.

I absolutely loved The Best Summer Of Our Lives. It was beautifully written. The friendships with their ups and downs were perfectly captured by Rachel Hauck – and the scenery came alive under her descriptive pen. It was so easy to picture the lake and the cabins, and ‘feel’ the heat.

Friendships are important. We see that though there are disagreements, love is the glue that binds people together. We need each other and we need God.

The Best Summer Of Our Lives is a book that you do not want to miss. It is a book that I know I shall want to re-visit, it is so beautiful.

I received a free copy via the publishers. A favourable review was not required. All opinions are my own.

JULIA WILSON