The Summer We Fell Apart by Local Author Robin Antalek: Review

Robin Antalek’s The Summer We Fell Apart delves into the unstructured life of a family headed by an unreliable father and an ill-caring, alcoholic mother. The novel opens with the father and oldest son, Finn, on a trip to Europe, where we quickly learn that the family resents their father for his distant behavior—a trait that appears to have been fairly consistent throughout their lives. Recently, he’s left their mother to pursue the life of a single man, and when the siblings find out he’s fathered a young foreign girl and she’s sent to live with them for the summer, they completely lose faith in their family, driving them further apart.

When summer ends, Finn becomes an alcoholic and falls into a pit of depression. George heads off to college, leaving his closest sister Amy alone in the house with their mother, who’s always too busy acting to recognize that her children are having problems. Kate, the eldest daughter, is estranged from the family. Ironically enough, or maybe not so ironic, is that the death of their father is what actually brings the children back together, rekindling their sibling bond.

Antalek rotates her narrators (using each of the four children, along with their mother), allowing the reader to engage with each character, as well as giving her audience a glimpse into each of the family member’s inner psyches. Amy is young and naive. George is the homosexual, as well as the intellectual. Finn is the family troublemaker and Kate, the overachieving workaholic.

What Antalek makes clear here is that there’s no such thing as the perfect family. The parents in this novel are no Mike and Carol Brady and the children have more difficult problems than whose turn it is to use the bathroom. In the novel, the family needs each other, but typical at times to real life, they only seem to push each other away.

The first sections of the novel do read slowly, but by mid-section, it picks up pace, and the characters as well become more well-rounded and relatable. The issues Antalek delves into are real ones, those that are relatable to many families. Unfortunately, the end isn’t the big bang I would have hoped for, but it did leave me wondering, as well as feeding me with a need to stay connected with my own family, because as Antalek so eloquently points out, your family is who you’ll always come back to, whether or not you plan it that way.

Incidentally, Robin Antalek is a local writer, who currently resides in Saratoga Springs. This is her first novel.

To read more about The Summer We Fell Apart or to purchase a copy, click here.

–Juliet Barney is an Assistant Editor of The Free George. 

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