The Summerhouse

The Summerhouse is a superb novel. It combines two stories in one. The first is set in the present, around Abby and her friends, who befriend a local writer, Stan. The second is set in the future, with gripping themes of GM, the afterlife and second sight, and is co-authored by Abby, her friends and Stan. The first story gives Alison Prince the chance to write about how she works with children. She co-authored How’s Business sixteen years ago with children from a Lincolnshire primary school and a visit to that school for three days to work with the present generation of children set off this book. The scenes with Stan and the children are fascinating in terms of how authors choose names and personalities for their characters, how they make the plot move along and how ruthless they have to be with structure. The story that is created, about a GM research site called Massa which tries to control the dreams of its employees while creating dogs with the breath of dragons, becomes more complex and gripping as the book unfolds. Prince interleaves the two stories and although the second one is supposed to be the utterly fictional one, set in the future, you end up caring more for its characters, Cat and Luma, than the down-to-earth children of the present. However, Stan, a Pullman-cum-Grisham figure who usually writes adult thrillers but has now turned his hand to children’s fiction, sensitively absorbs the preoccupations of the children (Abby has a fear of death after her sister was killed in a car accident, Chokker was beaten up by his stepfather and lives with foster parents, preferring to play his role-play martial arts computer game than socialise much) so that the empathy for Cat and Luma can be transferred back to the ‘real’ children. Whichever story you end up preferring, The Summerhouse is unmissable on so many levels and demands to be read again and again.