Every Other Weekend

I wish I could find where I first read about Zulema Renee Summerfield's debut novel, Every Other Weekend. Summerfield was a child of divorce in the 1980s. I was a mother of three young children during my divorce in the 1990s. The review I read had me really curious about whether I'd find any of my family's own experiences in the page of this adult novel.

I'm about 1/3 of the way thru the book at this point. I guess some aspects of divorce are pretty universal. But even the ones that aren't universal, the stories about Nenny, the protagonist in this novel, spark memories of some of my own stories. In the back of my mind, I've always thought that some of the anecdotes from my divorce are book-worthy.

Every Other Weekend is really a series of sequential anecdotes. I wonder how many of them are real. But like I said, it's really brought my memories to the forefront of my mind.

Nenny is an 8-year old with a wild imagination. The story seems to alternate between anecdotes of real occurrences in Nenny's family and stories that exist only in Nenny's imagination. Jenny is a fearful child and her imagination only fuels her fears further.

I've now finished the book.

Expected tragedy strikes, as I was warned it would, and thankfully, no tragedy even remotely similar to that one ever struck my little family. But it's not a tragedy that I ever saw coming. I can't imagine how a blended family survives. (I hope that's not too much of a spoiler.) Maybe it's good that the the book veered off in this direction.

The end of the book moves towards all of Nenny's family moving forward, healing in some sense, and finding their new normal. Nenny's 3rd grade teacher is called away and a new teacher takes her place who really helps Nenny change her thinking and how she feels about the world - both the larger world and her small place in the world. I hope that in my teaching life I was a force for change.

(Nenny's new teacher, Sister Mary, incorporates current events into the classroom activities. Two of the current events issues that Nenny reads about but doesn't understand enough to use for her assignments were about gun control. And immigration.

"There's no reason a private citizen should have a need for a semiautomatic rifle."

There's an article called "The Immigration Mess," accompanied by a photo of people waiting in an endless, hot-looking line. 

Remember, this book takes place in 1988 into 1989. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The Berlin Wall comes down and I really appreciated Summerfield's depiction of that and what the Wall coming down meant to several of the characters.

I'm not sure whom I'd recommend this book for. The children's characters are written realistically. To me, the parents are a bit more like caricatures of divorced parents. Some of the writing is a little choppy. If you are blessed enough to not have experienced divorce, this might seem either realistic - or unrealistic. And if you have been through a divorce where children are involved, no doubt events you hadn't thought about it years will start playing like a home movie in your mind.