Swing Sideways by Nanci Turner Steveson (review)

Annie’s summer is to include “minimal structure, no spreadsheets, and lots of independent decision making”—doctor’s orders. While her parents are on board in order to ease their daughter’s panic attacks and help her overcome an eating disorder, it’s a fight for her schedule-loving, rigid mother to watch Annie disappear out the door of their summer home every morning, just as it’s a struggle for Annie to assert herself and not agree to tennis or sailing or any of the trappings of summers past. Annie uses her newfound freedom to roam with California, the granddaughter of a reclusive and disliked neighbor. Although California is there to care for her grandfather as he goes through cancer treatment, she’s the one who gets dark circles under her eyes and becomes increasingly fatigued as the girls spend the summer traipsing field and stream, saving an injured dog, building a chicken coop, and searching for clues to the estrangement between California’s mother and grandfather. Steveson drops hints along the way as to California’s deteriorating condition but allows the readers to encounter the characters as they encounter one another: just as they are and just what the other needs. The book focuses more on feeling than details, and the emotions are there and keenly felt, from the palpable tension created by Annie’s mother’s helicopter parenting to the love between friends and between parent and child—love that makes the heart “swing sideways.” This will please country girls at heart, those needing to be brave, and those wanting a good summer story of friendship and growth.