SUMMERWORK

A punishment turns into a summer of love and exploration.

Sixteen-year-old Leo Arceneaux stole his late father’s motorcycle and crashed it into his uncle’s retaining wall, earning himself a season of hard work. Sent to labor with a landscaping crew at Rigby House, a sprawling, run-down Minnesota estate that’s undergoing renovation, Leo expects sore muscles and long days, not mystery or romance. Living and working on the grounds, he meets Connor, the beautiful and aloof heiress to the Rigby family fortune. As the only teenagers on the vast, isolated estate, their shared loneliness and mutual attraction draw them together. When human bones are unearthed on the grounds, Connor enlists Leo’s help in uncovering the buried history of her family and Rigby House itself. Together they pore over old logbooks and explore half-forgotten corners of the property. These discoveries promise a deeper reckoning with the past, but the novel struggles to fully capitalize on this storyline. The author introduces numerous plot points that linger without resolution; instead, considerable space in the narrative is devoted to detailed depictions of Leo and Connor’s physical relationship, often at the expense of narrative momentum. While the central love story is sensuous and intense, the imbalance leaves the novel feeling too lightly sketched, with its most compelling mysteries frustratingly left unexplored. Most characters are cued white.

A passionate romance resting upon an underdeveloped narrative.