TWO WEEKS OF SUMMER

A woman babysits her niece and learns some important lessons in Tirado-Ryen’s novel.

It’s 2005 in Little Rock, Arkansas, and 26-year-old Kim Kincaid has been tasked with babysitting her 6-year-old niece, Summer, while Kim’s older sister, Dena Nordstrom, is on vacation with her husband at a ski resort for two weeks. Kim is ill-equipped to take care of a child—pretty much the only sustenance in her house at the moment is leftover Chinese takeout and vodka—but she resents the fact that her sister thinks she’d be bad at it. The novel jumps around a bit, presenting flashbacks of Kim’s relationships with her family members, but most of the story follows Kim as she adjusts to taking care of a young child. She struggles at first, but she and Summer do eventually bond, and Kim learns that she can be a responsible adult when she tries. Readers also meet her best friend, Jillian Martin, who has a big personality; she’s having an affair with her married boss. Kim’s also starting to have doubts about Jared McKenzie, her boyfriend of two years, who comes off as a jerk; he’s so awful, in fact, that readers may find it hard to muster much sympathy as Kim decides whether to break up with him. This is a layered story, with complicated relationships between Kim and her late mother, between Kim and Dena, and between Kim and her friends and boyfriend; the siblings’ parents consider Dena to be the family’s golden child, and Kim struggles to get out of her shadow, which increases her insecurity in other areas of her life. Some flashbacks feel a bit unnecessary, revealing little that readers can’t gather from the main storyline; for example, in 2005, Kim has an encounter with a woman who bullied her in high school, and readers can easily infer how mean that woman is, but the author includes a flashback of her bullying Kim in the past, anyway. Overall, though, this is a pleasing story of a young woman deciding what she wants.

A slightly uneven but often sweet coming-of-age tale.