UPDATE 8/2/2019: Very soon after writing this post I should have come back here and corrected this entry, but I knew no one was reading, and I didn’t bother. Now I’m about to begin promoting the blog so I’d better do it:
Yes, this book has a bit of the exotic fantasy about it, but it is also one of the best novels about race by a white woman I’ve ever read. Willig’s depiction of 19th century racial tensions is (to my eyes at least) extremely nuanced, and the love story’s happy ending could easily have rung false, but you can tell that the author was very careful to make things happen in a particular way. Although visible authorial intentions like this often feel clunky and fake, in this case it felt inevitable and lovely, and made me feel like I was in safe hands with this story. Thank you, Lauren Willig. I can confidently and enthusiastically recommend The Summer Country.
I’m currently reading The Summer Country by Lauren Willig, through NetGalley. Man, can that woman write. You can just sink into her stories and never want to leave. There’s one not-so-little issue with The Summer Country, though: the reader’s complicity in Willig’s fantasy of the West Indies.
The book is set in Barbados, where an old-fashioned generational dual story plays out. The authorial standpoint, and the expected reader’s standpoint, is that slavery and racism are wrong, but Willig still trades in the trope of the sensual tropics, and the breakdown of Western values that occur when Europeans let themselves be corrupted by their own desires. Yes, the Black characters are individuals with their own characters, but it just feels a little wrong to me–a little bit like cheating. Sometimes I cheat, it’s true. But if I’m going to cheat, I need to remember that I’m doing it as I’m reading. Ah, crap–am I about to put this down now? I don’t know, I think I’ll keep giving it a chance. It’s most certainly a book about Whiteness, and perhaps if I see it as that, rather than as a book about people, it will go down easier.
Every Book, Every Reader 