Summer Secrets by Jane Green

At first I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy this book.  Having an alcoholic as your central character is a risky decision and I was expecting this to descend in to a parody of the condition as most books usually do.  Fortunately, there is no parody here and Cat's story of how she comes to rely on alcohol to get her through the day and the descriptions of how tightly it grips her are unsentimentally described.  Her refusal to see her predicament, her reluctant attempt at sobriety to keep the man she has fallen in love with, her spectacular fall off the wagon she was desperately clinging to and then her genuine attempt to put alcohol in her past are dealt with sensitively and yet have the brutal edge of reality.

I actually really liked Cat, despite her many flaws.  She felt entirely real on the page and the contrast between her apparently glamorous media job and the disaster that was her home life felt entirely believable.  I also loved her wit, even in her darkest hours she seemed to find a turn of phrase that would elicit a wry smile.  There is also a good attempt to explore the nature of alcohol addiction and how much of it we are predisposed to - the nature vs nuture debate - and in Cat's case there are strong indicators that it is a genuine mix of both (unstable early life with a depressive mother and a controlling father figure who leaves her feeling than she is worthless, a father who she didn't know about who has his own problems with alcohol and writes them off as being his heritage).  I even enjoyed her AA sessions, yes the whole "higher power" thing they eschew makes me VERY uncomfortable but there is no doubt that it can and does help an awful lot of people and this novel illustrates how it works.

However, the book is about so much more than Cat's alcoholism.  It is about the struggles that life throws at us and how you just have to knuckle down and get on with it.  If you are lucky you have a support network to get you through and hopefully that is your family.  This book deals with Cat's struggles to find that family and about how friends can become your family.  It is beautifully written and I got really sucked in to the author's fictional world.  The only downside for me were the Nantucket sections, I have only read two Jane Green books and they both heavily feature Nantucket so it had a vague air of Deja Vu about it in places.

The ending does leave the reader feeling a little cheated with its will-they-won't-they.  However, I kind of liked that as it leaves the reader to make up their own mind about how events unfold for Cat, Jason and Annie after that fateful summer.