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![The Summer I Dared: A Novel by [Barbara Delinsky]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/510Fja+ZeHL._SY346_.jpg)
The Summer I Dared: A Novel Kindle Edition
Barbara Delinsky (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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WHAT COMES AFTER THE MOMENT THAT FOREVER CHANGES YOUR LIFE?
This is the question that haunts Julia Bechtel, Noah Prine, and Kim Colella, the only survivors of a terrible boating accident off the coast of Maine that claimed the lives of nine other people.
Julia, a forty-year-old wife and mother, has always taken the path of least resistance. Pigeonholed by her controlling family and increasingly distant husband as "loyal" and "obedient," she realizes in the aftermath of her brush with death that there is more to her -- and to the world around her -- than she ever imagined.
Feeling strangely connected to Noah, the divorced, brooding lobsterman who helped save her life, and to Kim, a twenty-one-year-old whose role in the accident and subsequent muteness are a mystery, Julia begins to explore the unique possibilities offered by the quiet island of Big Sawyer, Maine. Suddenly, things that once seemed critical lose significance, and things that seemed inconsequential take on a whole new importance. With each passing moment, each new discovery, Julia grows more sure that after coming face-to-face with death, she must have more from life.
Resolving to make things right for the future and drawing on an inner strength she never knew she possessed, Julia passionately awakens to a new world, fearlessly embracing uncertainties in a way she couldn't have imagined only a few weeks ago.
Set off the coast of Maine, where lobstermen leave with the tides each morning to haul and reset their traps, and neighbors gather each night to feast on the catch of the day, Barbara Delinsky's The Summer I Dared is a deeply moving story of the risky but rewarding search for self, a story of survival, and of the irrepressible ability of the human spirit to rebound from disaster and to create life anew.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateMay 4, 2004
- File size2649 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Delinsky combines her understanding of human nature with absorbing, unpredictable storytelling – a winning combination.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review))
“Delinsky plots . . . with the sure hand of an expert.” (Publishers Weekly)
“Delinsky [writes]… with simple prose and a deliberate avoidance of happily ever after clichés.” (People)
“A compelling mystery [combined] with an insightful portrayal of captivating people.” (Booklist)
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Julia Bechtel was airborne only as long as it might have taken had a large someone picked her up and heaved her high into the ocean. She went underwater in a stunned state, but she never lost her orientation. Even before her downward plunge slowed, she was clawing against the sea to propel herself back up. When her head broke the surface, she gasped for air. The waves rose around her, but she fought them. Focusing on that singular need to breathe, she used her arms and legs to create a rhythm matching that of the sea in an effort to keep herself afloat.
Her breath came in shallow gasps, along with a creeping awareness of what had happened. She heard in echo the sound of screams, an impact, and an explosion, all drawn from immediate memory. Pushing wet hair from her eyes, she looked around, trying to get her bearings. The waves were littered with pieces of wood, ejected from the boat just as she had been, but where the rest of the Amelia Celeste should have been there were now flames furiously devouring wood and God knew what else, and the line between black smoke and white fog was lost.
Instinct told her to move away from the fire, so she fought the tug of the waves and pulled herself backward. Her sandals were gone, as was her pocketbook, and when she felt the weight of the wet quilted blazer dragging her down, she slid her arms from that, too. She was trembling, though she didn't know whether from cold or from shock. Fear hadn't yet set in.
"Hey!" came a shout from the smoky haze, then a head appeared. It was the man who had been with her in the bow. He was swimming toward her. "Are you hurt?" he called loudly enough to be heard above the roar of the flames.
She didn't think she was. Everything seemed to be working. "No," she called back.
"Hold on to this," he said as he pulled forward what he'd been towing. It was a long seat cushion, clearly buoyant. "I'm going back in."
Grasping the cushion, Julia was about to ask if that was possible, when another staggering explosion came. She barely had time to take a breath when the man pulled her under to escape the falling debris. By the time they resurfaced, gasping and sputtering, treading water in the churn of the waves, the hail was done.
Going back in was a moot point, then. The flames were louder, the smoke more dense.
In obvious anguish, the man stared at the devastation. Seemingly as an afterthought, he tore his eyes from the smoke, looked around for the cushion, swam for it, towed it back. "Hold on," he said, and when Julia complied, he dragged the cushion through the waves, farther away from the wreck. All the while he stared into the smoke and the flames.
Suddenly, he did an about-face in the water and turned those anguished eyes in the opposite direction. "Hey!" he screamed in desperation toward what Julia assumed was the shore. "Get out here! Hey! There are people who need help!"
Julia knew he wasn't referring to himself or to her. They appeared to be unscathed, but there were all those others on the far side of the flames, who might have been hit by debris, knocked unconscious by the explosion, or burned by the fire.
Incredibly, the man began to swim toward the smoke.
"Don't go!" Julia cried. She had visions of his disappearing and never being heard from again -- or perhaps she just didn't want to be left alone. The fog was thick, the fire close, and she had no idea how far they were from shore. For the first time then, with a marginal grasp of what had happened, she did feel fear. The ocean was a big place and she an infinitesimally tiny dot in its midst. Two dots were better than one.
He kept swimming. After a minute, though, he stopped. He bobbed in place, staring at the flames, before recalculating and swimming to the left of the fire, but the waves fought him there, pushing him back when he might have moved on. So he let himself be carried back to where she was and, once there, grabbed hold of the cushion.
"Did you see anyone else?" she asked. She was breathing hard, but nowhere near as hard as he was.
He shook his head, then twisted it back toward shore again. It was another minute before Julia heard what he had, and another minute after that before a boat emerged from the fog. A working lobster boat, it was smaller than the Amelia Celeste and nowhere near as polished, but Julia had never seen anything as welcome in her life.
In no time, she had been helped over the side and into the boat, wrapped in a blanket and settled in the small cabin under the bow. Once there, though, she began to shake in earnest, because not only were those sounds reverberating in her mind -- screams, impact, explosion -- but she could see it again: the sudden emergence of a huge purple point coming out of the fog, just high enough to start right over the side of the ferry, before crashing down in its midst.
Unable to sit still, Julia went back up to the deck, where she stood, dripping wet and trembling under the blanket, now with a hand at her mouth and her eyes on the fog. The smell of smoke was overwhelming; she raised the blanket over her nose to diffuse it.
The man who had been with her in the water was also aboard, but there was no blanket for him, no coddling. He and two others were leaning over the side, peering through the fog and smoke as the boat dodged its way along between pieces of wood, fiberglass, and miscellaneous other matter that Julia couldn't identify. Some were burning, some were not.
The ghost of another search boat flickered briefly in the fog before heading in the opposite direction. When a third search boat appeared, it drew alongside, and the man who had been with her in the water climbed into it.
Julia didn't ask questions, and he didn't look back. He was clearly a local, known by the men in both boats, no doubt known by the rest who had been in the Amelia Celeste. He was worried.
Feeling a deep sense of dread, she watched the third boat pull away. She followed the sound of it, struggling to see through the fog, until her own boat turned away.
"We're gonna get you in," the captain explained as the boat picked up speed.
"You don't have to," she said quickly. "I'm okay. Shouldn't we stay here and help with the search?" She felt a need to do that.
But the captain simply said, "I'll drop you ashore and come back," and sped on.
Chilled as the wind whipped through her wet hair, Julia took shelter in the wheelhouse, eyes on the front windshield, waiting for sign of land. Within minutes, a darkness materialized, a body of land rising from the water, with a serrated skyline rising high above it. Another minute, and the mist thinned to reveal a small fishing village built into a hillside.
The boat pulled up at the dock. Of the islanders already gathered there, one woman ran forward.
Zoe Ballard was Julia's mother's youngest sister, a late-in-life child, barely twelve years older than Julia. That closeness in age alone would have been enough to justify the bond Julia felt. More, though, Zoe was interesting and adventurous, irreverent, independent. She was everything Julia was not but admired nonetheless.
And now here she was, wearing a woven patchwork jacket and frayed jeans, her chestnut hair windblown, her features delicate like Julia's, eyes filled with tears. But her arms were strong, helping Julia as she stumbled off the boat, then hugging her tightly for what seemed like forever. Julia didn't complain. She couldn't stop shaking. Zoe's strength helped. She felt safe with her, safe on dry land, safe and alive -- and suddenly terrified that others were not. She looked back at the boat in time to see it head out again.
That quickly, the crowd closed in, and the questions began.
"What happened?"
"How many were on the Amelia Celeste?"
"Have they pulled others from the water?"
Not knowing where to look, Julia focused on Zoe. "A boat hit us. There were six, seven, maybe eight others on the ferry."
"Did you catch any names?" Zoe asked and Julia understood why. Ferries like the Amelia Celeste were casual things. Tickets weren't booked ahead; there would be no list of passengers. Any information Julia could give would be a help to the islanders gathered there.
But she could only shake her head. The rest of her body continued to tremble. "I was in the bow. They were in the stern."
She tried to picture the group she had seen when she boarded the boat, but the image was vague. Running down that dock, she had been distracted and tense after a harrowing seven-hour drive up from Manhattan. It should have been an easy drive -- would have been, had she left when she had originally planned. But her husband had given her a raft of last-minute errands, treating her as usual like a maid, something she had come to sorely resent. Driving out of the city, she had wallowed in that resentment, mentally arguing with Monte as she didn't dare do in person, venting a frustration that had been building for years. Add to that the growing realization that she was late enough to miss the ferry she was booked on, that she didn't know if there was another ferry that day, and that she had no idea where she would spend the night if she didn't get to the island, and her level of tension had risen. She had driven above the speed limit much of the way, a problem in and of itself. She didn't drive often, least of all on the highway. What she had hoped would be a pleasant drive had turned into a white-knuckle experience.
The only good thing had been her luck in finding the Amelia Celeste ready to leave.
Lucked out? Well, perhaps. She was alive and well. But others?
"Her arm's bleeding," said a man who emerged from the crowd. He didn't appear to be out of his thirties, though he carried an air of mature confidence. "Can I check her out?"
Julia was startled to see the blood on the underside of her forearm.
"He's a doctor," Zoe explained quietly. Stepping out of her clogs, she knelt to put them on Julia's feet.
Julia put a hand on her shoulder for balance. "Won't a Band-Aid do?" she asked, because she didn't want to leave the dock.
"Hi...
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From AudioFile
Product details
- ASIN : B000FC1MHI
- Publisher : Scribner (May 4, 2004)
- Publication date : May 4, 2004
- Language : English
- File size : 2649 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 512 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #119,577 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,087 in Contemporary American Fiction
- #1,107 in Women's Psychological Fiction
- #1,917 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Barbara Delinsky, author of A WEEK AT THE SHORE (May 2020), BEFORE AND AGAIN (2018), BLUEPRINTS (2015), SWEET SALT AIR (2013), ESCAPE (2011), and NOT MY DAUGHTER (2010), has written twenty-five New York Times bestsellers, with many more of her books on other national bestseller lists. There are nearly forty million copies of her books in print, including those published in thirty languages worldwide.
Barbara's fiction centers upon everyday families facing not-so-everyday challenges. She is particularly drawn to exploring themes of motherhood, marriage, sibling rivalry, and friendship.
A lifelong New Englander, Barbara earned a B.A. in Psychology at Tufts University and an M.A. in Sociology at Boston College. As a breast cancer survivor who lost her mother to the disease when she was only eight, Barbara compiled the non-fiction book Uplift: Secrets from the Sisterhood of Breast Cancer Survivors, a handbook of practical tips and upbeat anecdotes. She donates her proceeds from the sale of this book to her charitable foundation, which funds an ongoing research fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Barbara enjoys knitting, photography, and cats. She also loves to interact with her readers through her website at www.barbaradelinsky.com, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/bdelinsky, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/barbaradelinsky/, and on Twitter as @BarbaraDelinsky.
Customer reviews
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En route to the island for her vacation, Julia suffers a horrific accident that changes her outlook on life. The book deals with Julia's search for herself and what she wants out of her life. This became a little tedious at times.
The book was slow going at times because Barbara Delinsky really researched lobstermen. There was too much detail, for me at least, about how the lobsters are caught, how the traps are prepared, how the buoys are painted, and on and on ad infinitum. I wanted more story and not so much about the technicalities of catching lobsters.
That said I still liked the story and it was enjoyable but not Delinsky's usual five star read.
This story is based in Maine on a small coastal town of Big Sawyer. The main protagonist, Julia Bechtel, comes to the island to vacation and visit with her Aunt Zoe. On her way to the island she is involved in a horrible boat accident that kills nine people. The only survivors are Julia, Noah Prine, a lobsterman, and a young woman, Kim Colella. Their lives are entwined from that moment on.
Julia struggles with the why and how this accident happened. She feels torn over the loss of all the other passengers that were on the boat and is drawn into the lives of the islanders. Her life is forever changed in ways she could never have imagined. She must rediscover herself and what she can do to make her life matter since she has been given a second chance on life.
I would recommend this book to anyone who needs to rediscover what it is important in one’s life. The author did an enormous amount of research about lobstering and angora rabbits in order to make this book more realistic.
I do think Julia could have been older. A 50 yo would have had more time to build resentment at how she'd lived her life, more than the 40 yo Julia. But there were other issues that tied in that required youthfulness, so sometimes an author has to sit on the suitcase of her story to get it zipped.
In the Acknowledgements, Delinsky reveals that in preparation for writing this book, she immersed herself in learning (exhaustively!) about two things she knew nothing about: the raising of Angora rabbits for commercial use, and the lobstering culture and business. She could have taken the easy route and written about something she knew, but in service to her art, she embarked on a path of learning. What a professional. She's an icon.
I also enjoyed reading about the life changing events in the book and how people grow from their experiences.
I highly recommend this book.
I read many of this authors books and enjoyed them all.
Top reviews from other countries

However, after an optimistic beginning I realized about a third into the book that I was getting more and more bored. The story in itself seemed promising, the characters were interesting but apart from the accident, very little happened. It's ok with some descriptions of a beautiful island, the sea, sunsets..... but this became too much. Also, if one does not have a special interest in lobstering, I would think all the details of this trade were far too many and too detailed.
For me the best part of the book were the times with the rabbits in the barn. Loved that. Otherwise, everything else was slow-going and I ended up skipping parts and just making sure I got all the predictable happy endings.
In my opinion Delinsky's book vary a lot. Before "More than friends" which to me was a page-turner, "Sweet salt air" bored me rigid, while "Facets" and "Flirting With Pete" were both brilliant.
I have not been through all Delinsky's books, but will try and find out as much as I can about the rest before I buy any more. The good ones are fantastic, so well worth looking for.

