THREE BIRD SUMMER

At a peaceful summertime lakeside retreat, three generations come to terms with growing up, growing old and letting go.

Adam knows this summer at the lake will be a lot different than past summers. Because of his parents’ recent divorce, his dad and cousins won’t be with them. Just he and his mom and his grandmother will share the cabin. Adam doesn’t mind spending time without other young people, but he gets worried when his grandmother displays slips of memory; she even takes to leaving notes to a man she knew as a young girl—not Adam’s grandfather—in Adam’s room. The mystery deepens when one of her notes mentions a treasure. With help from Alice, the girl who lives in the next-door cabin, Adam sets out to find the treasure, even as his mother makes plans to change his family’s life forever. St. Antoine writes with a delicate hand and lets her keen observation rule many of her pages: “Being old had to be so strange—to know you looked ragged on the outside, but to still feel...like the fresh young person you once were.” Adam and Alice are both endearing and believable teenagers.

Despite an ending that borders on convenient, this spirited novel seamlessly combines endings and beginnings against the beautiful backdrop of a lake in summer.