What Is The Plot Summary Of Summer Secrets?

Imagine finding out a shocking family secret while dealing with your first crush. ‘Summer Secrets’ follows June as she searches for the truth about her mom’s hidden past. The search becomes a deeply personal journey as June tries to piece together the clues and her journal becomes a personal and emotional search for the truth. The setting of the story on a lake side adds to the story of stormy nights and hope filled sunsets.

What resonates with me is the way Summer Secrets explores forgiveness. The anger June feels toward her mom is palpable but so too is the moment where June realises that adults are just people and therefore prone to making mistakes. And Eli – oh Eli! The transition from June’s witty banter with this boy to full on romance is sublime. In particular the scenes where he helps her work out the journal entries were amazing. It makes me want to go and rummage through my own attic to see if I can uncover any family secrets.

I really got drawn into ‘Summer Secrets’ by this author who expertly captured the transition from childhood to adolescence. The main character June is spending the summer swimming, eating ice cream and getting into drama with her family. However, her world is turned upside down when she finds her mum’s journal from when she was a teenager and had been having an affair with someone she shouldn’t be with. The two narratives run in parallel and at times are fabulous and give me shivers as we see June’s mum as a teenager falling for someone she shouldn’t be with and dealing with secret love, while June is falling for Eli the annoying teenager who June has had a summer of rivalry with since they were kids.

There is one scene in particular where June reads a passage in her mom’s journal about her sneaking out of the house to meet her secret love for a summer under the same oak tree where June meets with Eli years later. I loved this because it instantly made me want to go home and call my mom out and start asking her a million questions about her youth. In addition to this the author also accurately portrayed the small town in which June lives and the way everyone knows everyone else’s business. It made reading about June’s search for the truth really hard at times. In the end I was a puddle of emotions. Some of them were due to the romantic aspect of the story but most of them were due to the beautiful reconciliation of June and her mother.

This book I am reviewing I randomly picked up in the library a few days ago, because the cover was very nostalgic for summer. In the book ‘Summer Secrets’ by Sabrina Jeffries, the main character is a teenage girl called June and she spends her summer at a cabin by a lake, owned by her family. In the underfloor storage of the cabin June finds an old journal, belonging to her mother from decades ago. What June reads is the account of her mother’s summer of romance and it revealing a long hidden family secret. For the rest of the book June is left to try to work out what the secret is and how it affects her and her family today, whilst trying to work out her feelings for her first love – the boy next door.

A great summer read – but also more – Summer Secrets is skillfully written to allow tender moments of growing up, while developing the mystery as an onion is unpeeled, layer by layer. When June confronts her grandmother with the truth in one exciting scene, you will feel as if you are sitting on the porch with June and her grandmother, surrounded by fireflies blinking in the darkness of the summer night.