Invincible Summer

Invincible Summer
Alice Adams
Little, Brown and Company (June 28, 2016), 321 pages
Kindle Edition $ 7 99, Amazon paperback $10.01

Invincible Summer covers twenty years in the lives of four friends in England. The story begins in 1995 when the group is finishing college. It ends twenty years later in 2015.

Eva comes from a lower middle class background, but forged a career in investment banking. Sylvie is an artist who had difficulty getting her act together until circumstances changed her perspective. Lucien spent years representing himself as a club promoter but actually paid the bills by selling drugs. Benedict is a physicist analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider.

Each member of the group has his or her own struggles. They had varying degrees of staying in contact and being out of touch. Degrees of success varied as well. They all had serious relationship issues. The author does and excellent job of interweaving the stories and keeping the plot moving forward. Eva takes center stage in her efforts to succeed in the cutthroat world of investment banking, and I found myself wanting her to succeed in spite of the fact that her actions were not always entirely ethical. The others get their fair share of attention as well. While it was easy to be sympathetic towards Benedict and even Sylvie, it was hard for me to develop much sympathy for Lucien and his poor choices.

In the end, I enjoyed the novel, but things were wrapped up just a little to neatly at the close of the book.