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    The Gypsy Moth Summer: A Novel
    The Gypsy Moth Summer: A Novel
    The Gypsy Moth Summer: A Novel
    Audiobook12 hours

    The Gypsy Moth Summer: A Novel

    Written by Julia Fierro

    Narrated by Christa Lewis

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    It is the summer of 1992 and a gypsy moth invasion blankets Avalon Island. Ravenous caterpillars disrupt early summer serenity on Avalon, an islet off the coast of Long Island-dropping onto novels left open on picnic blankets, crawling across the T-shirts of children playing games of tag and capture the flag. The caterpillars become a relentless topic of island conversation and the inescapable soundtrack of the season.

    It is also the summer Leslie Day Marshall-only daughter of Avalon's most prominent family-returns with her husband, a botanist, and their children to live in "The Castle," the island's grandest estate. Leslie's husband Jules is African-American, and their children biracial, and islanders from both sides of the tracks form fast and dangerous opinions about the new arrivals.

    Maddie Pencott LaRosa straddles those tracks: a teen queen with roots in the tony precincts of East Avalon and the crowded working class corner of West Avalon, home to Grudder Aviation factory, the island's bread-and-butter. Maddie falls in love with Brooks, Leslie's and Jules's son, and that love feels as urgent to Maddie as the questions about the new and deadly cancers showing up across the island. Could Grudder Aviation, the pride of the island-and its patriarch, the Colonel-be to blame?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 20, 2017
    ISBN9781541483071
    The Gypsy Moth Summer: A Novel

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    Reviews for The Gypsy Moth Summer

    3.5/5

    25 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I've got mixed feelings about this book -I thoroughly enjoyed it until the end, then I was left disappointed by how everything turned out (but maybe I just had my heart set on a happy ending). I did enjoy reading about the lives of the various characters living on the island of Avalon, and I especially liked the Marshall-Simmons family and their complex relationships with the rest of the islanders. It was weird to read something set during the 1992 presidential election (Bill Clinton comes up repeatedly), but it did give the book an added historical context. An interesting read overall, one I just can't say I conclusively liked.
    • 5/5
      Author Julia Fierro garnered critical praise for her debut novel, Cutting Teeth, about a group of preschool parents and a weekend they spend together on Long Island. (My review is here.)She managed to corral a large group of characters and make them believeable and interesting. In her new novel, The Gypsy Moth Summer, we once again get a multi-character saga, this time set in 1992 Avalon Island, a stand-in for Long Island.Leslie has been estranged from her wealthy parents since she married Jules, an African-American man. Leslie and Jules have two children- handsome, sensitive teenage Brooks and toddler Eva. When Leslie inherits her parents' large estate in Avalon, she moves her children and a reluctant Jules back to her now-crumbling family home.Jules is less than excited, but he is a landscape architect and the beautiful gardens on his in-laws' estate seduces him. What he could do with those gardens! But he fears Leslie is hiding something from him too.Jules is also concerned about his son Brooks. There aren't many black families on Avalon, and when Brooks becomes involved with Maddie, a 16 year-old with an alcoholic mother, and a father who berates (and beats) her and her brother Dominic, Jules' antenna is raised.Maddie's grandfather is the Colonel, a man who holds an important position at Grudder Aviation, a company that made its upper echelon millionaires off the many years of government contracts they procured.The effects of aging are taking its toll on the Colonel, and his wife Veronica can't hide his condition forever. Veronica doesn't trust Leslie, believing that she has come home to cause trouble for Grudder, so she intends to use Maddie's relationship with Leslie's son to uncover Leslie's plans.Once again, Fierro writes multi-faceted characters, and each person's point of view is distinct. We understand why they do the things they do. Fierro creates such empathy for each of her characters, even the ones you may not particularly like.You'll be transported back to your own teenage summer romances as Fierro gets those feelings and the 1992 atmosphere pitch-perfect. (The 1992 presidential race, the clothes and the food will bring back memories.)Fierro has many balls in the air here, and she juggles them all with admirable skill. The Gypsy Moth Summer deals with family issues, class distinctions, race issues, summer romance, the military complex, corporate pollution and yes, a gypsy moth invasion that overshadows everything happening in the summer of 1992. I highly recommend The Gypsy Moth Summer, it will be one of the most-talked about books of the summer.
    • 4/5
      This is a beautifully written book about a summer in 1992 where everything changes. The author uses the life cycle of the gypsy moth as a background to the story and as the moths burst into life, so too does life on the island. As the gypsy moths were totally destroying the leaves on the trees and exposing the houses below so too was the ongoing story exposing the people on the island for what they really were. Avalon Island was divided by the very rich who lived in the big mansions and whose teenage children had nothing better to do than drink and do drugs. The other half of the island was made up of the working class whose teenage children often spent their summers working. Everyone on the island is connected with Grudder aviation who build plans during the war and now was inadvertently poisoning the drinking water and causing a large amount of cancer on the island. In the summer of 1992, with the return of Leslie Marshall and her African-American husband, racism becomes one of the main themes of the summer. This is a large book with lots of characters (who are often difficult to keep straight) and touches on many important topics. It's a coming of age story for Maddie and Brook, it's the story of classicism, racism and environmentalism. This is not a simple beach read but a novel to be read when the reader can sink into the story and see the often dark side of life during this time period.
    • 4/5
      Leslie Marshall returns to Avalon in the summer of 1992 with her African- American husband and their two children. Leslie has inherited her parents estate on the island and her father was once a key executive at Grudder Aviation. Grudder is the island’s biggest employer but environmental issues have tarnished its’ reputation. The Marshalls immediately attract attention from folks on the island because they are perceived as different. Prior to their death, Leslie’s own parents did not accept her husband, Jules, which kept them from visiting Avalon. Jules feels uncomfortable living on the island, encountering prejudices from many of the residents. Maddie Pencott LaRosa is a teenager living on the island and is the granddaughter to the patriarch of Grudder Aviation. She is being raised by an abusive father and an absentee mother. Maddie falls in love with the Marshall’s son, Brooks, and tries to shield him from her racist father. As tensions build over the summer, so does the population of gypsy moths. This story explores the judgements that divide people into social classes due to wealth and racial stereotypes. It also shows how parents can attempt to push their own biases onto younger generations. This is Julia Fierro’s second book.
    • 3/5
      Very often books provide us with an escape. But sometimes they show us a place not so much an escape but a waking nightmare, a place we don't want to go. Julia Fierro's The Gypsy Moth Summer, a novel about a wealthy community in turmoil, facing its secrets and prejudices, is narrated almost exclusively by outsiders or those on the fringes. And while the characters might, although not certainly, want to be a part of this group, the reader definitely does not.In 1992, Avalon Island, off the coast of Long Island, is being overrun by rapacious gypsy moths. As they decimate the island's foliage and it's anyone's guess which trees and shrubs will survive the onslaught, they coat everything beneath them in black excrement. The inhabitants of the island are themselves coated in the nastiness of racism, classism, and willful ignorance and disregard of environmental safeties in the name of profit among other things. This ugliness comes to a head when Leslie Day Marshall, the daughter of one of the island's ruling families inherits The Castle, her family's estate, and moves back to Avalon with her black husband and two mixed race children. Leslie's husband Jules is a Harvard trained landscape designer but his skin marks him immediately as an outsider. He is wary of this place, cognizant of the daily casual racism he encounters, uncomfortable except when he's working in the garden. Their son Brooks is a teenager and daughter Eva is just a toddler when they move into this very white, very rich enclave. Maddie Pencott LaRosa is Brooks' age and she lives next door to him in the guest house on her grandparents' estate. Like Brooks, she is an outsider in the tony East side. Her mother grew up in East Avalon, a daughter of wealth and privilege, but Maddie's father is Italian from West Avalon, the side of the island where the working class lives, so Maddie is constantly straddling both sides of a sharp class divide and desperately wanting to fit in with the preppy teenagers at her high school. This summer she's finally made it into the coveted in-group. Her younger brother Dom is also an outsider, his crime hers but also complicated by the fact that the bullies have homed in on the fact that he's gay, something that Dom is only just figuring out himself and is certainly not acceptable in the military inspired society of East Avalon. Veronica, Maddie and Dom's indomitable grandmother, has come back to the island with their grandfather, the Colonel, hiding some major secrets but determined to fight for Grudder Aviation, the company that looms so large over the island. All of these characters come together this summer in what starts out seeming innocent enough but ends explosively.Jules, Maddie, Dom, and Veronica are the focus of the bulk of the narration with occasional chapters about Leslie's multiple miscarriages and one notable chapter centered on the Colonel. Each of these outsiders builds up a damning story of a terrible place. It's a place where the main industry, Grudder Aviation, is potentially (almost certainly) poisoning the very water the inhabitants drink. Cancer and other biological disasters run rampant through the population who lives there. It's a place where bored, rich teenagers are left to their own devices, drinking, smoking, doing drugs, and exploring sex, while their parents stumble drunkenly from one big, gracious home to another, gossiping about one another, acting two-faced, and turning aaside from their own unconscious racism. It's a place where both casual and intentional cruelty is ignored and accepted. The only disruption to this long standing life is the appearance around the island of graffiti targeting the environmental crimes perpetrated by Grudder. "Grudder is cancer. Grudder kills." These startling pronouncements only cause a ripple in the lush, dreamlike life of the island. But just as the gypsy moths tearing through the island's greenery leaves the land naked to view, so too the events of the summer leave the society and the company open to scrutiny.The writing is hypnotic and intense with descriptions of the moths, their excrement, and their devastation. Fierro has created a place that is so real feeling you can hear the moths crunching through the trees and see them writhing on every trunk. All of the characters here are hollowed out by desperation of one kind or another. They are well fleshed out and although they seem easy to read, each of them has more going on underneath the surface than expected. But this is a society based on appearance so what's underneath doesn't matter. Until it does. But Fierro doesn't let the reader forget that even the superficial gloss of wealth isn't pretty; in fact, it's downright ugly. The novel was uncomfortable to read and Avalon Island itself sounds like a terrible place filled with horrible people but the novel shines a light on all of the awfulness, the hidden crimes and their unacknowledged impact through the shocking final reckoning in the end. There is an air of impending disaster throughout the novel, heightened by the inexorable progress of the gypsy moths from hatching through to spawning. The narration shifts are easy to follow but sometimes the jumps from one character to another weaken the narrative thread, making it a little too easy to set the novel down. And there isn't an "ism" or social ill that isn't included in the story, lessening the impact that a tighter focus might have had. The foreshadowing is pretty obvious but there are still a few surprises in the end. This is not a light summer read but those who want more heft in their beach bags might enjoy it for sure.
    • 3/5
      There are certainly a lot of things going on in this book and it all happens in just one summer. There are back stories for some of the characters, as well. Most of the characters are teenagers doing what teenagers do. It all comes crashing down in the end when racial tensions, environmental concerns and a plot for revenge meet head on.A pretty good story that I found interesting and entertaining. The whole story seems to be crashing towards a pretty bad ending for the characters. The author gives you a hint that someone gets shot. My intuitions kept going back and forth as to who this character would be. Definitely a sad ending.Thanks to St. Martin's Press for approving my request and to Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.