“In the summer of 1977, Victoria Leonard’s world changes forever when Caitlin Somers chooses her as a friend. Dazzling, reckless Caitlin welcomes Vix into the heart of her sprawling, eccentric family, opening doors to a world of unimaginable privilege, sweeping her away to vacations on Martha’s Vineyard, an enchanting place where the two friends become “summer sisters.”
Now, years later, Vix is working in New York City. Caitlin is getting married on the Vineyard. And the early magic of their long, complicated friendship has faded. But Caitlin begs Vix to come to her wedding, to be her maid of honor. And Vix knows that she will go—because she wants to understand what happened during that last shattering summer. And, after all these years, she needs to know why her best friend—her summer sister—still has the power to break her heart.”

For once, I don’t think Amazon’s description does this book justice. It doesn’t speak to the intervening years from 1977 to 1996 when Caitlin chooses Vix as her friend and when the friendship ultimately ends. And to say that the friendship ends may not be true. If you lose someone, does the feelings ever go away?

On one of the last pages of the book is a quote:

“Alone on the bluff, with the waves crashing below, Vix unleashes her anger. “Damn you for leaving! For not caring enough about us!” She shouts and screams at Caitlin, going on and on about friendship and love refusing  to believe Caitlin is gone forever or that she, so terrified of disappearing, had orchestrated her own disappearance. Could she possibly be so cruel?”

This quote so describes my feelings about my step-daughter. Actually, when I look back on Caitlin’s character, I realize that I see quite a bit of my “Kimber” in her. Even her choice of changing her name from “Kim” to “Kimber” because “Kim” was just too ordinary. Kimber (and we never called her anything but “Kim”) tried so hard to live a life that made her special, because being “Kim” just wasn’t enough. She often told me that the only thing she had ever done right was to be a mother. She was a helicopter mother to be sure, and her heart was broken when her oldest son turned fourteen and decided to move across the country to live with his father and then inexplicably cut her out of his life entirely.

But she lived her life burning bridges behind her. She’d find a job she wanted, quit the one she had with no notice, always saying that the company hiring her needed her to start immediately. She moved every year, bouncing from one apartment to another. She changed spouses and significant others the way most of us change shoes. When her younger sister met and married a man and had the white dress wedding, Kimber divorced the husband she had remarried. She became engaged and married a man who was ten years younger than she and she got the white-dress church wedding she had never had before. But although this relationship lasted longer than some of the others, she ultimately divorced him too.

But when she passed away, the chapel was filled to standing room only with all the people who knew her and loved her.

This book touched me.