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.