#BlogTour The Girls of Summer – Katie Bishop

Rachel has been in love with Alistair since she was seventeen.

Even though she hasn’t seen him for sixteen years and she’s now married to someone else.

Even though she was a teenager when they met.

Even though he is twenty years older than her.

She’s found it impossible to let go of their summer together on a remote, sun-trapped Greek island.

Until now.

When Rachel unexpectedly reconnects with a girl that she knew back then, she is forced to re-examine her memories of that golden summer and confront the truth about her relationship with Alistair and about her time working for an enigmatic and wealthy man on the island. And when Alistair returns, the pull of the past could prove impossible to resist…

Ahhh The Girls of Summer is an intoxicating read which brought up a lot of big emotions for me as I read. We follow Rachel in a dual timeline, skipping between her seventeen year old and her thirty four year old self. Before we settle into the meat of the story, there is a tantalising initial chapter where we see that something has fallen apart and thrown Rachel. We don’t really know what but it is something significant and something which seems to shatter her. After this, we jump into the current day timeline and meet grown up Rachel and her husband Tom as they head towards the last night of their holiday. As they are visiting the island where Rachel once lived and worked, Tom thinks it would be nice to visit the bar where she used to work. A kind and thoughtful gesture in his eyes, but one which sends Rachel back into a sea of memories which were barely being held below the surface even after a decade and a half have passed. A chance encounter with an important person from this time drags these memories more sharply into her mind and provides a contact for someone else who really should be kept in the past. Rachel is unable to focus on her present and leave behind her history and slowly gets drawn into something that might destroy all the good she has built for herself.

I found this to be an engrossing read and one which kept me interested and guessing throughout. There are a lot of ‘oh no’ moments, particularly with Rachel’s teenage timeline. It’s somewhat like watching an accident in slow motion – you can see what is going to happen, wish that it wouldn’t but cannot look away. Oh how I wanted to be able to intervene and stop her making some of the choices she made and help her find her way back to the girl she was before she went holidaying with Caroline. I don’t know if my reaction was heightened as the mother of a girl or would I have felt the same reading this a decade ago? I suppose you can never really be sure, but my heart ached for how she saw herself and how her actions were shaped by the wrong person at the wrong time on the back of poor self esteem and lack of self worth. Perhaps all women reading this will relate in a way to the awkward, not quite sure where or how to fit in, lacking in confidence that Rachel has? I liked reading Katie’s words about her book – you can see them below.

This is a story which can’t fail to move the reader and one which is well worth reading and might just start a few difficult but important conversations.

About Katie Bishop: Katie Bishop is a writer and journalist based in Birmingham, UK. She grew up in the Midlands before moving to Oxford to work in publishing in her early twenties. Whilst working as an assistant editor she started writing articles in her spare time, going on to be published in the New York Times, Guardian, Independent and Vogue.

Katie started writing The Girls of Summer during the first UK COVID lockdown, after becoming increasingly interested in stories emerging from the #MeToo movement. The novel is inspired by her own experiences of backpacking, and by her interest in how personal narratives can be reshaped and understood in light of cultural and social changes.

In 2020, Katie moved back to the Midlands, and now lives in Birmingham with
her partner. She is a full-time writer.

Katie says: “My novel explores themes of consent, power, and memory through the story of a woman reliving a memorable summer in her late teens. Through her emerging memories the novel explores abuse and victimhood, and how victims can rewrite narratives of trauma. I was initially thinking about writing a book that encapsulated some of the nostalgia and excitement of ‘the one that got away’, but at a time when the #MeToo movement was evolving quite rapidly I started to reflect on my own past relationships differently. Myself (and a lot of women that I spoke to) were starting to understand their formative relationships and sexual experiences in a different light. I started to think about how I could use the idea of ‘the one that got away’ to explore this reckoning, and how it feels to realise that a relationship that profoundly impacted you could be interpreted in a different light.

The Girls of Summer is a book for every woman. One of the things that I have found most interesting about bringing The Girls of Summer into the world has been the conversations that I’ve had along the way. Almost every woman that I talk to about the book has their own story, their own personal reckoning. An experience they are reminded of that, as an adult, they have had to make peace with. The #MeToo movement bought about solidarity and empowerment, but it also opened up vast wells of trauma, shame and pain. We have all seen women coming together to shoulder this burden, and to help each other through this. I hope that The Girls of Summer reflects both the horror and the hope of this collective experience.”