Review
Kerri Maher delivers nostalgia, heartache, and hope in Summer of Love. Through her characters, readers witness the battle between nature vs nurture, and how one person’s struggle with inner demons can ripple across bloodlines and generations.
While the book’s setting takes place during the historical social movement from 1967 San Francisco, the titular emotion is the main focus. Summer of Love is a book about addiction and recovery, and a family picking up the pieces left behind by tragedy. All while building a global empire. However, Love is the driving force of the story. Love can help us forgive, heal, and carry on. Not just love for others, but for ourselves as well.
The author doesn’t shy away from serious, hard-hitting events that define the characters. That being said, readers should be aware of content triggers such as suicide, alcoholism, substance abuse, recovery and relapse, miscarriage, child abandonment, infidelity, and estranged parental relationships. Those who can accept these topics in their stories are highly encouraged to add Summer of Love to their reading lists. They may even find the characters’ journeys comforting.
Kerri Maher joins the Cantina Book Club Podcast to talk about her own journey with sobriety and shows us how to make a delicious mocktail. Keep an ear out for the episode and preorder Summer of Love, available July 7.
Book
1967: Concerts, hippies, and war protests define the counter-culture revolution that flourishes during the Summer of Love in San Francisco. No one is more into the messages of love and peace than Winnie Hartley, who has just graduated from UC Berkeley determined to make it as a poet. When she reconnects with her high school boyfriend Lincoln Salyer, it feels like her life is finally everything she wants it to be. Meanwhile, her sister Miranda throws herself into running the family business, Hartley Vineyard, determined to make California wine that rivals French. Little do the sisters know that the choices they make and the secrets they keep will set their lives down radically different paths.
2015: Dawn Hartley has a secret that she can’t share with her mother Miranda, who has long been her closest confidant. How can she possibly admit that she has a drinking problem to her famous vintner mother? It feels like a betrayal of her own heritage. When an assignment for work requires her to research the wildly popular Vineland novels by a famously anonymous writer, she embarks on a quest that will shake her to the core, and just might set her life on the right path at last.
