Book Review: Black Dog Summer by Miranda Sherry

Pros: interesting characters, beautiful writing, heartwrenching story

Cons: will make you cry - a lot

When Sally, aka Monkey, was killed on the animal rescue farm where she was living with her daughter, she expected that to be the end of her story.  But the ongoing stories of her estranged sister, curious niece, brother-in-law she was in love with, and catatonic daughter, prevent her from leaving.

Set in South Africa, the book has some speculative elements (the spirit watching over its family and the Sangoma that lives next door), but is essentially a story about family and dealing with loss.  Sally’s spirit follows several characters, allowing you to really get to know them.  The family dynamics become more clear as time goes on, and you see how mistakes of the past compound and form emotional trials in the present.  It’s also highly effective that a lot of the story is told from the perspective of the 11 year old niece, who doesn’t know what the word ‘genocide’ means and has to look it up on her brother’s computer and whose curiosity and nosiness subsequently gains her knowledge she’s not ready for.

The writing is beautifully descriptive, with a lot of sensory information telling you how things look, smell and feel.  The metaphors used are unique, but work within the context of the story.  For example, “The morning sun beats through the muslin blinds of the bedroom window, making the room look as if it’s been pumped full of golden gas”.

The ending, where you finally learn the extent of what happened at the farm when Sally dies, is gut-wrenching, but don’t think that’s the only sad part of the book.  Books have made me cry in the past - for a chapter or two, when a character I loved died or something else irrevocably sad happened to them, but I haven’t cried this hard in years.  From the first few pages this book grabbed my heart strings and then kept pulling them over and over again.

I loved the portrayal of the Sangoma and how her story was resolved.  I’m less sure about the massacre and the ‘black men are coming with machetes’ message of the main story.  I don’t know enough about South Africa to know if this is still a modern fear or if the book plays on a remembrance of apartheid (which, though it feels like it happened a long time ago really didn’t).  But the book was written by a South African woman.

I loved this book.  I loved the descriptive language.  I loved the characters.  I loved the setting.  If you’re looking for something different, give this a try.

Shout-Out: Black Dog Summer by Miranda Sherry

In this extraordinary debut novel reminiscent of The Lovely Bones and Little Bee, a mother watches from the afterlife as her teenage daughter recovers amidst the startling dysfunction of her extended family.

A small, bright thread of a story weaves out from the moment of my passing and seems to tether me to this place. Perhaps this is why I have not left yet. Perhaps I have no choice but to follow the story to its end.

Compulsively readable and stylistically stunning, Black Dog Summer begins with a murder, a farmstead massacre, in the South African bush. Thirty-eight-year-old Sally is but one of the victims. Her life brutally cut short, she narrates from her vantage point in the afterlife and watches as her sister, Adele, her brother-in-law and unrequited love Liam, her niece Bryony, and her teenage daughter, Gigi, begin to make sense of the tragedy.

A suspenseful drama focusing on marriage and fidelity, sisterhood, and the fractious bond between mothers and daughters, Black Dog Summer asks: In the wake of tragedy, where does all that dark energy linger? The youngest characters, Bryony and Gigi, cousins who are now brought together after Sally’s murder, are forced into sharing a bedroom. Bryony becomes confused and frightened by the violent energy stirred up and awakened by the massacre, while Gigi is unable to see beyond her deep grief and guilt. But they are not the only ones aware of the lurking darkness. Next door lives Lesedi, a reluctant witchdoctor who hides her mystical connection with the dead behind the façade of their affluent Johannesburg suburb.

As Gigi finally begins to emerge from her grief, the fragile healing process is derailed when she receives some shattering news, and in a mistaken effort to protect her cousin, puts Bryony’s life in imminent danger. Now Sally must find a way to prevent her daughter from making a mistake that could destroy the lives of all who are left behind.