The Forever Summer

Clunky characterizations mar Brenner’s (The Wedding Sisters) novel about three generations of women linked by a DNA test. When 22-year-old Rachel Moscowitz contacts 30-year-old second-generation attorney Marin Bishop with news that they may be half-sisters, Marin’s life is in disarray. She’s facing a broken engagement, being fired for a workplace affair, her parents’ separation, and now the discovery that the man she calls Dad is not her biological father is simply too much. Why did her mom, Blythe, keep it a secret, and why does she insist on joining the two younger women on a trip to Provincetown to meet their grandmother Amelia? This is a summer of revelations about infidelity and of change: for Amelia and her partner Kelly’s long relationship, for Rachel as she tries to grow up and falls in love for the first time, for Marin, whose life turns upside down; and for two very different half-sisters forging a connection. Brenner tells these messy personal stories well, but some characters lack complexity. Only Amelia and Kelly emerge fully-fleshed. Too often, Rachel resembles a lovestruck teen and Marin a conceited adolescent, while Blythe tends toward the pathetic rather than the sympathetic. (Apr.)