Zulema Renee Summerfield / Every Other Weekend

Booksmith hosts Zulema Renee Summerfield for her debut novel, Every Other Weekend. Please join us!

The year is 1988, and America is full of broken homes. The protagonist of this stunning debut novel is eight-year-old Nenny. Her life turns upside down when her parents announce they are getting a divorce. Her weekends are spent shuttling between their homes, watching her mother move on quickly while her father struggles to keep it together. Nenny’s mother soon remarries and moves them into a home with her new husband and his own children. The memories of their former family life have been swept under the rug.

Nenny has always been an anxious child with an overactive imagination but recently has had a creeping premonition that something terrible is going to happen. In her new home, intimations of impending earthquakes (gulp) and neighborhood home invasions converge with ghosts from her stepfather’s days in Vietnam. Knock-kneed and a little stormy-eyed, she is far too small for the thoughts that haunt her—yet her fears are not entirely unfounded. Indeed, tragedy does come—in the most awful and unexpected way.

Set in the sun-scorched suburbs of California, where teased hair and Bret Michaels mania reign supreme, Every Other Weekend is a story about the surprising ways in which families fracture and reform. It’s a story of love lost and found, and how sometimes the closest bonds we create come in the wake of unimaginable tragedy.

Zulema Renee Summerfield’s short fiction has appeared in the Threepenny Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her first book, Everything Faces All Ways at Once, is available from Fourteen Hills Press. A MacDowell Colony fellow, she lives in Portland, Oregon.

This event is free and all ages, with mature themes.

RSVP appreciated but not required.