A+Song+for+Summer+(SGS)

A Song For Summer, Eva Ibbotson review by: Samantha Seiler

Ellen Carr, a beautiful young girl, lives with her mother and two aunts, all of which are extremely suffragette, in England. She absolutely loves to work, and can’t seem to live without helping anything living, small and large. At eighteen Ellen begins work as a house mother of the children Hallendorf, an English school in Austria during Hitler’s rise to power. World War two had not yet begun. Ellen faces the challenge of taming wild children at the school who do just unusual things. Not only are the children strange, but the teachers as well. To have an entire class period of pretending to be a fork one day and a spoon the next, seemed to Ellen, a very odd thing. Ellen decides she must help the school’s problems as well as try to keep happiness within it while war emerges. This is a great challenge, especially since Marek, the much loved groundskeeper and fencing teacher is away on secret missions. Marek is also a strange character, for though he may be a kind and very attractive young man, there is still that wild and strangeness to him. When the peculiar Marek finally comes back to the school, Ellen begins to fall in love. Sadly, as everything seems just right with her love life and the school, World War two gets in the way of things. Also, Ellen’s best friend Kenneth seems to be finding every chance he gets to be her husband... Not to mention Marek’s famous ex girlfriend... And his secret musical past? That brings it all back to the title, “A Song for Summer”.

I recommend this book if you like soft love stories that has a cliff hanger sort of way to it. I liked this book very much because of its happiness and suspense but it was still romantic all at the same time. If you enjoy historical fiction romances, this is the book for you. The only thing I disliked about this book was that sometimes I had to force myself through the parts when the author would explain things for entire chapters, that made it just a little boring. Besides the boring parts, Eva Ibbotson does a great job pulling you into the story and wanting you to read more. Personally, I had to be dragged away from the book because I just couldn’t put it down. This definitely isn’t a short book that you can just sit and read for twenty minutes, it needs more time than that to really pull you into the story or else you will end up pretty bored. This book is just compelling, and I encourage you to read it. It’s your loss if you don’t!