As a middle school English teacher, writer Darby Bozeman became obsessed with teaching story structure to her students, telling them that a story is “like a roller coaster.”
She then carried that same passion into her writing. The result: her debut novel Summer’s Never Over, complete with the many twists and turns she’d describe to her students.
In a recent What We’re Reading interview, Bozeman described her protagonist, Greer Olsen, a woman in her late 20s who is struggling with what she wants out of her life versus what others’ expectations for her are.
Bozeman explained, “I think there's a lot of bravery that goes into that…She's really complicated, but at the end of the day, I do think she is a brave person in a lot of different ways.”
Notably, Summer’s Never Over takes place at a popular summer camp in the remote mountains of Georgia. Dread’s Cove has been Greer’s home since birth until a destructive fire and seemingly accidental death of Greer’s friend results in the camp’s closure. Greer leaves shortly after, devastated and vows never to return.
Five years later, Greer’s mother, who worked tirelessly to re-open the camp, dies and Greer must now return home and come to terms with her grief. What she must also deal with is evidence that the fire, and her friend’s death, may not have been an accident after all.
Bozeman knew that she wanted this story to take place at a summer camp because she met her husband at a summer camp when she was in college. She said, “I just always thought it was a very romantic type of place, which sounds funny, but romantic in the sense of like anything can happen here.”
But Bozeman also recognized how a summer camp could make a perfect place for tension and suspense.
She explained, “It's very insulated, everyone's together. It's kind of claustrophobic with how everyone's spending all this time together and these relationships get really intense really fast. And summer camp just kind of kept coming up as an idea for me … Once we got to the camp, I was like, there's a lot of good juicy stuff here.”
Darby Bozeman’s debut novel Summer’s Never Over is published by Penguin Random House.
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