Charles Simmons seeds his narrative with clues from the very beginning. First, there is the epigraph from Ivan Turgenev's classic
First Love , a tale of obsession, betrayal, and death, followed by the sobering first sentence, "In the summer of 1963 I fell in love and my father drowned." By the time Zina, the 20-year-old object of the young narrator's affection, appears, all the foreshadowing is tidily in place--Michael and his father have already had one brush with mortality in the water as they swim out to a sandbar and are nearly carried away by the tide. When Zina and Michael's father first meet, another warning bell goes off. "I could see right away he liked her. When he didn't like someone he smiled and said nothing. It was clear that she liked him too. Father was very handsome." Readers familiar with Turgenev's story will know what happens next; those who aren't will have to wait awhile to have their suspicions confirmed. In the meantime, Simmons paints a subtle, heartbreaking portrait of one last summer of innocence and of a paradise about to be lost.
