The New York Times Book Review - Dean Bakopoulos
Zulema Renee Summerfield's Every Other Weekend comes as close as any novel I've read to capturing post-divorce depletion, and she does so from a child's perspective, which is exactly as gut-wrenching as it sounds. Almost nothing is as sad to witness as a child burnt out by life—and it is this sensation that lends Summerfield's impressive debut its weight…8-year-old, third-person present tense is a difficult point of view to pull off in a sentimental novel about a family's dissolution, though Summerfield mostly nails it. Every Other Weekend manages to be both funny and fierce as it reminds the reader, through Nenny's charming narration, that children are always paying attention. It reminds us that the world's fierceness, whether in the form of dueling parents or current events, is almost always heavier on their minds than we, the train wrecks they depend on, want to believe.
Publishers Weekly
02/26/2018
An eight-year-old girl named Nenny with a “natural predilection for alarm” is at the center of Summerfield’s perceptive novel (following Everything Faces All Ways at Once) about growing up in a fractured family at the end of the Cold War. The anxious third-grader lives in Southern California with her brothers, mother, and two stepsiblings at her new stepfather’s house and spends every other weekend with her beat-down dad in his sad apartment. Her mother no longer has time enough to soothe her fears, her stepdad doesn’t relate well to kids, and her new siblings resent the intrusion, so a new Brady Bunch they are not. The episodic story flows along through Nenny’s upbringing and includes vignettes like a family trip to the trailer park to see if Nenny’s stepdad’s ex-wife is safe from her new husband. The author occasionally puts adult thoughts in Nenny’s head, but mostly the girl’s voice is just right and features an authentically childlike logic. Interspersed with the narrative are chapters that spin out Nenny’s various fears and obsessions—home invasions, Gorbachev, whether her stepdad killed people in Vietnam—effectively revealing a sensitive child too young to make sense of her changing world. Summerfield goes overboard foreshadowing a tragedy, deflating the dramatic tension a bit. Nonetheless, the conclusion is unsettling and realistic, and fits the way the story evolves—this slice-of-life story, though not heavy on plot, moves clearly and confidently. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
"Every Other Weekend comes as close to any novel I've read to capturing post-divorce depletion, and she does so from a child's perspective, which is exactly as gut-wrenching as it sounds. Almost nothing is as sad to witness as a child burnt out by life--and it is this sensation that lends Summerfield's impressive debut its weight.... Every Other Weekend manages to be both funny and fierce as it reminds the reader, through Nenny's charming narration, that children are always paying attention."
—New York Times Book Review
"Zulema Renee Summerfield is among the best new writers I've read in a long, long time. In Every Other Weekend, she tells the truth, but with a beautiful slant, and any reader who comes in contact with this novel will be better for its singular vision."—Peter Orner
"You are about to meet your new favorite author. Zulema Renee Summerfield knows just where the fault lines lie in homes and hearts and families and in EVERY OTHER WEEKEND she leads us to those with a magical compassion. Summerfield's voice is hilarious and scathing and healing. We find ourselves here, inhabitable. In EVERY OTHER WEEKEND, Summerfield brings us home."
—Tupelo Hassman, author of Girlchild
"EVERY OTHER WEEKEND is a sensitive, funny, pitch-perfect tribute to the 80s and that era's loss of innocence, one that speaks with wisdom to the tender complexities of families spliced together in the wake of divorce. By the end of Zulema Renee Summerfield's accomplished debut, every character felt like family--or perhaps they just rem inded me of my own."
—Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
"Let this smart, sparkling debut take you back to the '80s and the land of broken homes... A fascinating look at what being a family is really all about."
—Nylon
"Summerfield creates a sense of time and of place so vivid.... Moving but not precious, a gently hopeful novel steeped in late '80s atmosphere."—Kirkus
"Summerfield's first novel is many things-a nod to late '80s news and culture, a case study of divided and blended homes, and an imaginative exploration of childhood fears. Mostly, though, it's the beautifully tender story of an eight-year-old's broken heart and her journey toward mending it."—Booklist
"Perceptive.... The girl's voice is just right and features an authentically childlike logic.... This slice-of-life story moves clearly and confidently."—Publishers Weekly
"Every Other Weekend is a charming coming-of-age story told from the perspective of Nenny, a slightly neurotic 8-year-old who finds herself splitting time between her dad's run-down apartment and her mom and step-dad's house. I love how Nenny sees and interprets the world and how she makes sense of all the adults dealing with their adult problems. Summerfield captures all the bigness of a young kid's everyday life: how everything means so much; how you wish for the parents you think you should have and how most of the time, they're not that. I just had a real moment with this book, I mean there's a lovable stray dog, a mean nun at Catholic school, and it all takes place in the late '80s. My excitement level for this book: Liz Lemon high-fiving a million angels."—Book Riot
"Summerfield captures childhood with incredible tenderness, and this book is absolutely heart-wrenching."
—Shondaland
Kirkus Reviews
2018-02-06
A young girl haunted by an impending sense of doom navigates the year after her parents' divorce in 1980s suburbia."It is 1988 and America is full of broken homes," begins Summerfield's domestic period piece. "America's time is measured in every-other-weekend-and-sometimes-once-a-week….Her children have bags that're always packed and waiting at the door." And so it is for 8-year-old Nenny and her brothers, who split their time between their mother's house—where they live with her new husband, Rick, and his two kids from his first marriage—and their father's grim apartment. But Nenny is anxious by nature, with "a natural predilection for alarm " and a deep-seated belief that "whatever can go wrong, will go wrong," although for most of her life—divorce excepted—it hasn't. Still, she is haunted by catastrophic scenarios inspired by the news and just real enough to be devastating: They all succumb to drought because her brother left the water running. There is a home invasion or an earthquake. Mikhail Gorbachev storms the Sacred Heart Catholic School and recruits Nenny's third-grade class into the Red Army. Mostly, though, Nenny's day-to-day life is ordinary for a precocious kid growing up in the '80s, trying to make sense of her new family setup. She "draws fashions" with her new best friend, Boots, who lives down the hall from her dad; eats fast food; goes to Disneyland. And then something catastrophic does happen, something horrible and gruesome, something Nenny never even thought to anticipate, and Nenny and her family are left to move forward, together. The details feel perhaps just a touch too familiar—the wise child, the distant dad, the mom doing the best she can—but Summerfield creates a sense of time and of place so vivid the specifics of the plot hardly matter.Moving but not precious, a gently hopeful novel steeped in late '80s atmosphere.
