In her debut novel THE GOLD DARK SUMMER, Susan Papas gives readers a dreamy, vivid backdrop upon which she paints the coming-of-age story of 14-year-old Sadie Stirling. Papas’s honest exploration of her protagonist’s inner world and outer life takes place over the course of a season at a British boarding school in the late 1950s. This slice of Sadie’s life is a particularly life-changing one, and Papas doesn’t miss a moment of it.
The book features a cast of clearly defined and well-developed characters. Sadie, along with her friends Lucy, Marigold, Jane, Maggie, and several other young women, do their best to navigate academics, rules and expectations, love, death, and the demands of their individual hopes and dreams. Over the course of the summer, they begin learning what it means to belong to themselves as well as one another, all the while gaining a clearer sense of life itself. Though it is a bit slow to get going, once the main conflicts arise, THE GOLD DARK SUMMER becomes immersive and even tumultuous. There is a great deal that happens, but every detail recounted along the way is important to who Sadie is becoming.
With this novel, Papas has proven that she is a capable storyteller with both an eye for beauty and a keen sense of empathy. That empathy gets applied equally to everyone in the story, from the adults in Sadie’s life, to the friends who both help and hurt her, and even to the young man who sets her heart alight for the first time. In that, it subverts expectations that one might have of its very niche setting. The young women see the double standards that exist around them, and know they want to be able to live more freely. They try to find that freedom however they can – a striking and beautiful journey that hits upon what all young people share in their adolescence. Yet it also zooms in on what makes Sadie unique, and even an artist in the making. That is ultimately what makes her story satisfying: she finds ways to stand out and discover who she is, even in the enmeshed community that surrounds her.
THE GOLD DARK SUMMER is a worthwhile read for those seeking a realistic reminder of what it’s like to be young, and of how, as one character aptly puts it, “Growing up like walking blindfold through a minefield.” That is: terrifying but exhilarating, with everything raw and brand-new. Papas conjures this feeling well with her detailed, poetic prose, and does so in a way that lingers long after Sadie’s story has concluded.
Susan Papas’ debut novel, THE GOLD DARK SUMMER, is a coming-of-age story that demonstrates the author’s keen sense of poetry, emotion, and empathy.
~Jennifer Weatherly for IndieReader