Portobello Book Blog

“We all have our time machines, don’t we? Those that take us back are memories… And those that carry us forward are dreams.” HG Wells

I am going to find it so hard to choose my Top Reads for 2017. I already had eight books listed as possibles when I read this and this wonderful book makes nine. I didn’t actually know what this book was about before I started it, I just knew that I love Rowan Coleman’s books so when I was offered the opportunity to read this, I wasn’t going to turn it down! And thanks to the publishers, you have the opportunity to win a copy – look for the giveaway link below.

As that wonderful HG Wells quotation which is used in the book suggests, this book involves an strong element of time travel. Now, it doesn’t matter whether you believe time-travelling is a complete impossibility or whether you are more open-minded on the matter, you will absolutely believe in what happens to Luna throughout the course of the book. 

Luna has travelled to New York with her sister Pia following their mother’s death. They have gone there to settle legal matters and find out a bit more about their mother who left in 1977 and never returned. Over the course of the few days they are there, impossibly, Luna finds herself transported back to 1977 and meets her mother and her friends. At first she thinks she must be ill, but slowly realises that this actually happening. On returning to present day New Year, she realises that she has changed  her future. And impossible though it seems, she begins to think she can change the course of her mother’s life. Will this mean losing the person she knows herself to be?

This is such a beautifully written book which I was caught up in for an entire weekend. Rowan Coleman has a real talent for writing about characters who you will take to your heart and you will live through all the experiences and emotions with them. Luna has had her world rocked by revelations she finds out about herself after her mother’s death and is struggling to deal with these at the same time as she is grieving. When she begins to realise that she can influence and change her mother’s life you can’t help feel for her and the impossible choice she thinks she has to make.

Love is such a strong feature in this book. Luna loves her mother so much, and perhaps only realises just how much when she is no longer around. She loves her as the young woman she meets in the 1970s and grieves for the loss of her vitality. The book asks the question about whether love lasts through time and I think it is answered by one of the characters who says: “our physical bodies, they break down, eventually returning to dust, but energy, energy is never destroyed. And what is love if it isn’t the most powerful energy we know of?

I was totally captivated by this book and it made me think once again about how all our actions have consequences, even though we may not know it at the time. The smallest interactions that Luna has in the past have profound effects on her future, but her vitality, her energy, her love remains. Sometimes, just sometimes, what seems impossible can really happen. The Summer of Impossible Things is a wonderfully magical book and I loved it.

Huge thanks to Ebury Publishing for my review copy via Netgalley. The Summer of Impossible Things will be published in hardback and as an e-book on 29th June. You can buy at all good bookshops or can order a copy online here.

If you’d like a chance to win a copy of this book, click the giveaway link below. You can enter up to midnight on Tuesday 4th July and the winner will be contacted within 24 hours. (UK giveaway only)

Click here to enter the giveaway

From the back of the book

If you could change the past, would you?

It is only after her mother’s death that Luna begins to discover her secrets.

While in New York to settle the estate, something impossible happens to Luna. She finds herself in 1977, face to face with her mother as a young woman, in the week that changed her life forever.

If time can be turned back, can it also be rewritten? Luna becomes convinced she can save her mother from the moment that will eventually drive her to suicide.

But in doing anything – everything – to save her mother’s life, will Luna have to sacrifice her own?

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Memory Book, this is a beautiful lush novel about love, courage and sacrifice, The Time Traveller’s Wife for a new readership.