If a warm sandy beach and lapping waves make you want to sing out loud, Jane Rosen’s “Songs of Summer” belongs on your playlist.
Author Jane Rosen, a longtime resident and lover of Fire Island, brings romance, forgiveness, and all the drama of a weekend wedding to the third book in her series set on the Island.
This time around, 30-year-old Maggie Mae Wheeler is facing life’s challenges.
Good as engaged to her childhood best buddy, and with big plans for her vintage record shop, Maggie seems to have it all together. But take another look, and there may be a crack in the vinyl.
Adopted at birth and feeling lost and adrift since losing her adoptive parents, Maggie sets out to find her birth mother. Tracking her down through a DNA testing site and the help of a recently received Fire Island wedding invitation, she heads to Bay Harbor. (A fictional community on Fire Island.)
On the ferry, she glimpses a woman who “looked both familiar and like a complete stranger.” There was something about her coloring, her hair, and the downward curve of her lips. Maggie froze. “She knew she had just seen her mother.”
Readers meet her father, Chance Logan, the once hunky lifeguard, now a “weather-worn bartender,” trying to flirt with a girl young enough to be his daughter—Wait! She is his daughter! Yet neither knows it yet. There’s a touching moment when Chance learns of his paternity and reflects, wondering if he’d have been less self-centered and more ambitious had he known he fathered a child.
Rosen has a knack for bringing back characters readers may or may not have met in her previous books in this series, making them feel familiar and familial. Renee and Jake, the wedding couple, were featured in On Fire Island. Addison and Ben now have two kids—time flies—who are the adorable flower girls at their wedding. And who could be more of a character than Shep Silver? I was pleasantly surprised to learn of his connection to Maggie, but I won’t reveal it.
Maggie is horrified when she sees her mom, Beatrix, screaming from a rooftop, cursing at her sister Veronica and reigniting their 30-year rift, in which Chase plays a key role. Shep, a witness to the chaos, collapses from the ordeal.
An only child of older parents, Maggie’s not used to such commotion and emotional outbursts. She wants to know her birth family better, yet she worries about what it might do to her safe and predictable life.
“Faking it?” she says to Matt, a super cute local she met on the ferry, when she learns Shep’s heart attack was a ruse. “So, he’s crazy too?”
Atypical of Maggie, who “wasn’t big on change,” she puts herself in Matt’s hands—literally, but it takes a while—posing as his faux girlfriend to get up close and personal with her birth family.
It doesn’t take long for her and Matt—a reporter for Rolling Stone—to bond. Decades-old music, vinyl, and cassettes become their touchstone, or touchtone. Composers, lyrics, top-ten hits, and musicians fly fast and loose, and before you can say 75 RPM, Maggie’s all-but-fiancé, Jayson, is slow-dancing alone in his hometown of Ohio. When he hops on a plane to the island, Maggie must decide who it will be: her reliable old bestie or the townie who makes her feel new again?
Rosen plays up the music theme, heading up each chapter with a track number and song title. For those in my generation, a track is the order of a song in a larger collection. e.g., “Track 3” means it’s the third song in an album’s order.
Told from varying points of view—Beatrix’s, Veronica’s, Chase’s, Jason’s, and Matt’s—the entire mishpocha (Yiddish for family/everyone) gives voice to loss, guilt, and the damage that secrets can wreak on clan and kin. Regrets and recriminations abound as the Silver sisters reach a cease-fire, and Maggie and Beatrix engage in a heartfelt conversation about the adoption that changed their lives.
And now comes the wedding, where all changes are for the best. So, let’s take a minute to “raise our glasses to the happy couple, and sing out, “L’chaim!” To life!
