Summer in the City of Roses, Michelle Ruiz Keil
Summer in the City of Roses, Michelle Ruiz Keil
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Summer in the City of Roses

Author: Michelle Ruiz Keil

Narrator: Michelle Ruiz Keil

Unabridged: 9 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 07/06/2021


Synopsis

All her life, seventeen-year-old Iph has protected her sensitive younger brother, Orr. But this summer, with their mother gone at an artist residency, their father decides it’s time for fifteen-year-old Orr to toughen up at a wilderness boot
camp. When their father brings Iph to a work gala in downtown Portland and breaks the news, Orr has already been sent away against his will. Furious at her father’s betrayal, Iph storms off and gets lost in the maze of Old Town. Enter
George, a queer Robin Hood who swoops in on a bicycle, bow and arrow at the ready, offering Iph a place to hide out while she tracks down Orr.

Orr, in the meantime, has escaped the camp and fallen in with The Furies, an all-girl punk band, and moves into the coat closet of their ramshackle pink house. In their first summer apart, Iph and Orr must learn to navigate their respective
new spaces of music, romance, and sex-work activism—and find each other before a fantastical transformation fractures their family forever.

Told through a lens of magical realism and steeped in myth, Summer in the City of Roses is a dazzling tale about the pain and beauty of growing up.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Alan

Rec. by: Charles de Lint, in F&SF; lovely local color Rec. for: Rosarians Nothing is how it's supposed to be, but everything is all right. —p.137This sentence ends a chapter about halfway through Michelle Ruiz Keil's Summer in the City of Roses—and I think it's thematically central to this amazingly go......more

This was an interesting picture of life for two siblings in the summer of 90s Portland, but I don't know if it was me or the author's writing style that had me completely confused and have to skip back some pages to realise what I'd missed. I think the final third took such a weird turn even I found......more

Goodreads review by Ellie

It's the early 1990s in Portland, and siblings Iphigenia and Orestes Santos Velos are spending their summers apart for the first time after their mother has left for a three-month-long dance residency. When their father had Orr sent away to a "rehabilitation" center in the woods, Iph ran away from h......more