The First Day of Summer
By Anna Alanko
An intelligent, funny and tragic novel about a nuclear family that has seen its best days.
The spouses try to overcome a wide range of challenges in their quest to become an ordinary family with two homes and relatively stable jobs. The couple’s relationship has plunged into a chaotic state, the wife tries to run family and professional life as usual while coping with a miscarriage, undergoing infertility treatments, and eventually bearing a distant spouse and a nauseous stomach.
When the husband’s relationship with a younger fellow student is revealed, and he questions the meaning of their marriage, the spouses find themselves on the couch of an expensive but poor therapist. They wander through the full range of remedies: exhausting togetherness, opening the relationship, speechlessness, and temporary separation.
During the process, they will become careless employees, self-centred friends, and bad parents. Despite the attempts nothing helps, only physical desire remains. But how many sex toys, hotel nights and dessous does it take to save the unsavable? Does one have to stay in a relationship because of an unborn baby? And how to start a new family with an infant that would need to have both his birth parents around? Can the charming, incredibly easy-going, warm-hearted, and understanding man in the yellow jacket live up to the expectations?
This sharp and feminist account captivates with its black humour and outrageously well-drawn desperate characters. To be devoured by readers of Nina Lykke’s and Riikka Suominen’s books.
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Reviews
"(…) its accurate observations, and honest openings of a woman's feelings provides a lot of identification also for others than only those who have opened up their relationship. For example, people who are divorced or in a new relationship or those affected by their partner’s new relationships. The emotions are quite common: struggling with jealousy, exploring one’s own boundaries, seeking the new self as a separate individual. It must be said once again that many do not have such a privilege on a global scale in terms of contractual openness, especially women. At least no one will be deceived when everything is open. However, it requires a lot of expertise, constant emotional work, and self-examination, which is also demonstrated in this novel."
"There is an incisive sadness and longing in Alanko’s debut novel but as a reader I mostly laughed. The book makes it clear again that no other human relationship behaves as incomprehensibly strangely as relationships. The story of the struggle for the survival of marriage draws the reader in."