Summer Sisters

Judy Blume's Summer Sisters is ably brought to life through a spirited reading by Annabeth Gish (Mystic Pizza, Shag.) Her fresh, youthful voice captures the essence of Vix and Caitlin, two preadolescent classmates who forge a powerful friendship while summering together on Martha's Vineyard. As their summers together continue, they discover boys, establish crushes, then move on to the more serious business of love and sex. With each new season their relationship becomes more complicated, sometimes verging on destructive.

This abridgement leaves Vix and Caitlin's story fully intact, but family backgrounds and some minor players are glossed over. Gish presents a fairly straightforward reading, with no attempt to take on male characters, accents, or otherwise assign unique voices to each person. Instead, she chooses to change inflection, intonation, and attitude to reflect their words and thoughts. Gish's narration is a pleasure to listen to and brings a new dimension to Blume's story of two friends who have so much in common, yet are nothing alike. (Running time: three hours, two cassettes)

No writer captures the seasons of our lives better than Judy Blume.  Now, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wifey and Smart Women, comes an extraordinary novel of reminiscence and awakening--an unforgettable story of two women, two families, and the friendships that shape a lifetime.

When Victoria Leonard answers the phone in her Manhattan office, Caitlin's voice catches her by surprise.  Vix hasn't talked to her oldest friend in months.  Caitlin's news takes her breath away--and Vix is transported back in time, back to the moment she and Caitlin Somers first met, back to the casual betrayals and whispered confessions of their long, complicated friendship, back to the magical island where two friends became summer sisters.

Caitlin dazzled Vix from the start, sweeping her into the heart of the unruly Somers family, into a world of privilege, adventure, and sexual daring.  Vix's bond with her summer family forever reshapes her ties to her own, opening doors to opportunities she had never imagined--until the summer she falls passionately in love.  Then, in one shattering moment on a moonswept Vineyard beach, everything changes, exposing a dark undercurrent in her extraordinary friendship with Caitlin that will haunt them through the years.

As their story carries us from Santa Fe to Martha's Vineyard, from New York to Venice, we come to know the men and women who shape their lives.  And as we follow the two women on the paths they each choose, we wait for the inevitable reckoning to be made in the fine spaces between friendship and betrayal, between love and freedom.

Summer Sisters is a riveting exploration of the choices that define our lives, of friendship and love, of the families we are born into and those we struggle to create.  For every woman who has ever had a friend too dangerous to forgive and too essential to forget, Summer Sisters will glue you to every page, reading and remembering.

Judy Blume's twenty-one books have sold over sixty-five million copies worldwide and have been translated into twenty languages.  She spends summers on Martha's Vineyard with her family.