Review: The Summer Garden by Paullina Simons

We're home!  David and I went on a cruise this past week with my MIL (Donna), BIL (Bryan), FSIL (Christine), and cousin-in-law (Amy).  It was awesome!  I have tons of pictures but they will be for the next few entries.  Today I'm going to do a wrap-up of the trilogy that I was reading when last I posted, with book three of the trilogy and my second new book of the year -- The Summer Garden by Paullina Simons.

Note: This review contains spoilers of The Bronze Horseman and Tatiana and Alexander.  If you haven't read them, get yourself to a bookstore and skip this review.

World War II has finally ground to a close, and Tatiana and Alexander have been miraculously reunited with each other and sent "home" to the United States of America, to begin their lives together as Alexander and Tatiana Barrington, with their four-year-old son, Anthony.  Still only in their twenties, they have decades of life left.  Except that war has aged them prematurely, they have spent only one month together since their marriage five years ago, they hardly know each other, and both are still haunted by the terrors inflicted on them by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.  When their original belief was that they had only a month of marriage to enjoy, what happens when they try to make a lifetime together, to live the American dream, having no idea how to relinquish the past?

Several people said that they were disappointed in this book -- that the passionate love story of Tatiana and Alexander was tainted with the cold hard facts that age, war, conflict, pain, can whittle away at true love until it is brittle and breaking.  I was not crushed.  While I was sad to find that their "true love" of TBH and T&A was changing, that was real.  It was unrealistic to expect Alexander to remain the same person after years shackled and beaten at one prison or the next, or to think that Tania would never carry any lasting pain and misery from losing her entire family during the seige of Leningrad.  To watch them struggle and learn to live with each other was maybe not as "romantic" as the previous two novels, but it was real.

I do wish the book had been about 20% shorter.  I didn't really care that much about their son, Anthony, nor about his military career or Vietnam or any of that.  I felt that once their children started growing up, the story sort of went all sorts of haywire.  But that's a personal preference.

I'd give TSG 3.5 stars, and the whole trilogy an overall rating of 4.

Rating: *** and 1/2