ATOMIC HEARTS

A writer looks back at the high school summer that changed her life.

Gertie’s life in Michigan is a mess. Her parents are on the verge of divorce, her mother fed up with her father’s inconsistent sobriety. Gertie’s lifeline is her best friend, Cindy, whose dad also struggles with substance use. But one winter night, at a party that Cindy doesn’t attend, Gertie crosses a line with Cindy’s boyfriend, a secret she can’t bring herself to reveal. By the following summer, Gertie’s grown more reckless, and after a serious injury lands her in the hospital, her mom wants her to make a clean break and sends Gertie to South Dakota to stay with her father. Gertie tries to lose herself in the novel she’s writing about a girl who crosses through a portal into a war-torn world, but there’s too much tugging at her: her father’s clear relapse, Cindy and the secret between them, and the new friends she’s making in Sioux Falls, two of whom vie for her romantic attention. “Was fate a feeling of owning your life, or of belonging to it?” she wonders, scrabbling for some feeling of control. But the betrayals and tragedies that summer holds will cast a very long shadow. Cummins toggles back and forth between Gertie’s summer in South Dakota and a time 15 years in the future when 30-year-old Gertie moves in with her now-disabled mother, layering Gertie’s far-past, nearer-past, and present over each other like vellum. (The novel that teenage Gertie writes seeps into the narrative, too.) But Cummins often makes this feel quite effortless, mostly through the power of her sharp prose and even sharper insights into, especially, the lives of teenage girls.

A promising debut novel about the heavy presence of the past.