This was really hard on the emotions and I’d say if you were going through the mill s bit right now, it might be an idea to put this one aside for a read later, when you were ready. ( )

Since reading Kylie Ladd’s debut novel After the Fall I’ve been anxiously awaiting her next release. When I finally got my hands on Last Summer I was ecstatic and relieved when from the first line I knew it wasn’t going to be a decision I regretted.

They were making love when Rory died.” p1

With the sudden death of Rory Buchanan, his devastated family and closest friends are faced with the uncomfortable truth of their mortality and themselves. Their grief creates fractures in their relationships as they reassess their priorities and struggle to deal with their loss. Unflinchingly honest, Last Summer has a deceptively spare style that is nevertheless loaded with subtext. This novel is not only about death, but life and how we go on living despite a tragic loss. It is a universal theme, a common human experience that we all confront at some time and this novel will make you think.

Last Summer unfolds from the perspective of nine characters, each of whom have been affected in different ways by the tragedy. One of the things I find most impressive about Ladd’s writing is that her characters live within the pages of her novel. They eat, shower, bicker, make love, go to work, arrange childcare; these ordinary events contrasting the tedium of living against their complex emotional lives. It is often said that no two people react to an event in the same way yet we many of us consider that there is a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way, particularly where grieving is concerned. Last Summer perfectly illustrates the individuality of response to crisis and forces the reader to examine their own attitude.
Ladd’s background in psychology no doubt assists her in creating well rounded, authentic characters who are both familiar and extraordinary. The ordinary group of middle class suburbanites in Last Summer are as emotionally complicated as any individual you know.
One of the reasons that this novel resonates so strongly with me is because there are some eerie parallels to my own experiences. The death of a friend from an aggressive cancer (barely 2 months after her diagnosis) in my late twenties had a similar impact to that which Ladd writes about, on our group of friends. In the aftermath of her passing a couple split, another nearly destroyed her marriage by having an affair, three of the eight women in our circle changed careers (we had all worked together at the time), two couples moved away. The loss changed us all as we were forced to confront our mortality and examine our life choices.

Entertaining and compelling, Last Summer is the best contemporary fiction novel I have read all year with it’s insightful examination of life and death in the Australian suburbs. I’m already greedy for Kylie Ladd’s next book. ( )

Kylie Ladd is another author that I like, and I have enjoyed her first book After the fall. This one reminded me of a book by another Australian author Christos Tsiolkas, called the Slap which was set in Melbourne like this one, and is one that I have read. They are similar in that they both start with one event and then tell of the repercussions of that event from the point of view of the other people involved in the story. But I liked this book much better than the Slap. In this case the starting event is the death of a man in his thirties Rory Buchanan. Rory is the captain of the local cricket club, the life and soul of any party, a popular man who hated to fail. But he was also devoted to his wife and two sons, and to his sister and her children. Rory dies suddenly at the beginning of the book and from then on the story is the story of his friends and how they cope and go on with their lives after his death. And through these people we get a little of the story of their children. All of the men are members of a cricket club in Melbourne and their boys also play there, and the wives and families get together often to share events concerned with the club. It is a major part of their lives, but it was Rory who held them together. It did take a little time to get to know them all, and who was married to who but as the book progressed I came to know them better. They all deal with their grief in their own way. We see the little issues that they must face. Who is to be captain after Rory - three people step forward. There was one really moving part in the story when Rory's sister Kelly comes around to one of her husband' s friends late one evening after a fight with her husband and when she is asked do you want to talk about the fight she says no I just want to talk about Rory (she was finding it hard to do that with Joe her husband) After Rory's death life just had to continue for his friends and their children and we see their struggles - getting through the funeral, the frist game after his death, dealing with their children and their daily schedules and their concerns. Kelly Ladd has taken us right into their lives. We see the way they like to interfere at times, and read of the hurtful things they can say to each other. The nine characters are not of course just dealing with Rory's death they have other issues and concerns in their own lives that are well presented- a meeting with and old flame that could turn into an affair, an unplanned pregnancy, an adopted child who finally tracks down her birth mother. This was a big one for we saw how this meeting impacted on all the family, the husband and the children. Unlike the characters in the Slap these were to me people that I liked that I could relate to, people that were real, that I could come across anywhere in my suburb. A great book. I look forward to her next one. ( )

Very tightly based on 'The Slap', set in and around Ivanhoe and Heidelberg in Melbourne. Trashy but readable, but with a very strange and unsatisfying ending.

As she did in After the Fall, Kyle Ladd has created very real characters who are easy to identify and who depict typical Australian families. I feel as I know each and every one of them.

I read this book in a weekend as I couldn't put it down and I wish it didn't have to end.