One Summer

One Summer - David Baldacci

I only read this one because, once I discover an author that I like, my anal tendencies force me to read everything by the author that has ever been published.  Although Baldacci’s main genre deals with political/government thrillers, every once in awhile he’ll take a detour and write about the sweet and sentimental.  That, itself is o.k., but unfortunately, he doesn’t really fare too well in this area.  Maybe he does fare well in this area, and it’s just that I don’t particularly like books of this nature.  I really wanted to like this one.  I really wanted him to pull it off.  I actually started out reading this book and thinking it might turn out o.k.  Even half-way through it I thought I might be able to give it at least a passing grade.  Unfortunately, the last 25 pages or so takes what is a very mediocre effort and brings the whole experience down to a category of “just plain bad and stupid.”

Baldacci has been guilty of “lazy writing” before in many of his other books.  Even some of the good ones.  This book has “lazy writing” all over the place.  By “lazy writing”, I mean that when he’s trying to advance the plot, he gets lazy and pulls things out of thin air that make absolutely no sense, nor really are believable, just to ensure that the story can keep going and moving in a forward direction.  I’ll get to that in a bit.

This story is about Jack Armstrong.  A 30 something year old man with a wife and three kids.  Unfortunately, Jack is dying.  He only has a few weeks to live when our story starts in November, and Jack is hoping to hold out long enough to celebrate one more Christmas with his family.  What is he dying of?  Baldacci never tells us.  The only thing we know is that the disease is so horrible, that Jack can’t even pronounce it.  This is the first example of “lazy writing”.  I guess Baldacci figures that if he gives us a real disease, he’ll have to do some research and explain why things might happen the way they eventually do.

One night during the hectic holiday season, Jack’s wife forgets that they’ve run out of his medication, so she heads out to the drugstore on a cold wintery night where they live in Ohio.  She’s killed in a car crash.  So now the three kids have no mom and a dad that will be dead in a few days.  Well, Jack’s in-laws are in town, fortunately, and arrangements are quickly made to permanently disperse the three kids to different relatives while Jack goes to die in hospice.  There’s a toddler, an elementary aged child, and a teenage daughter.  The teenage daughter seems perpetually ticked off at the world early on in the book because….well…she’s a teenager, and teenagers are supposed to be in a constant rebellious stage.  I guess.  The only thing she really clings to is her guitar because she’s a budding songwriter/guitar player or something.

So Jack goes to hospice to die, but (GASP!) he doesn’t die!  Somehow during the next several weeks he miraculously recovers!  So much so, that he’s able to walk out of hospice, retrieve his children (against his mother-in-law’s wishes.  Why? I honestly don’t know) and start life over again in a South Carolina beach house owned by one of his late wife’s relatives.  It seems Jack’s wife grew up in this town, and she sadly had some skeletons growing up there.  I believe she had a twin sister that died there when they were very young due to meningitis or something.  So Jack wants to start anew there, and maybe reconnect with his wife’s past.

Anyway, this is where the story really gets sappy and stupid.  I held out hope at this point  because I felt like things could have turned out o.k. story wise, but Baldacci, again, succumbs to more lazy writing.  Early on in the summer, Jack is trying to mend his distant relationship with his rebellious teen-age guitar playing daughter.  They stop to eat at a local restaurant called “Little Bit of Love” because the name of the restaurant is, according to Jack’s daughter, a “Def Leppard song” (It’s not.  Why couldn’t Baldacci pick a real Def Leppard song?  “Pour Some Sugar On Me” for instance?)  They go to the restaurant, and they meet the owner, who just happens to be a  divorced woman who, golly-gosh-darn-it, just so happens to be “good looking” and “about Jack’s age”.  This woman, golly-gosh-darn-it, also happens to have a son who is the same age as Jack’s daughter!  Her son, golly-gosh-darn-it, just happens to be a musician as well!  And the woman also has, golly-gosh-darn-it, some work at her house that Jack can do for her because, well, golly-gosh-darn-it, since Jack just moved here out of the blue, he needs to find some kind of work to pay the bills.  Oh, and also, this good looking divorced restaurant owner also, golly-gosh-darn-it, happens to be (ta-da) a lawyer!   A lawyer?  Jack doesn’t need a lawyer.  Well, because of Baldacci’s lazy writing, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out he’ll probably need one sooner or later.

It would be pointless (and painful) for me to go on any further with this lousy excuse of a story.  Everything is simply too stupid and contrived.   I do remember another golly-gosh-darn-it instance early in the story:  For no apparent reason, completely out of the blue, Jack decides to show his daughter a “self-defense move”.  This comes out of nowhere, has no connection to what is currently happening, and is so ridiculously out of place, that it’s incredibly obvious that his dear daughter will somehow need  this “self-defense move” sometime before the summer is over.  I’ve seen middle school students tell a more convincing tie-in within a story.

Again, I had hopes for this one.  It really could have been so much better.  Really, the only good thing I can say about this book is that it’s somewhat short, and I think I read the whole thing in about two days.  The last 30 pages, I read in about 5 minutes, just skimming the highlights (now THERE’S a misnomer!)  Had I read it carefully, I would have become nauseous.  I really hope that all “sappy” books aren’t this bad.  Of course, if they are, I could easily become a millionaire.  And so could just about anyone else that puts a pen to paper.