Life Without Summer

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Tessa Gray's life changes forever when she loses her four-year- old daughter Abby in a hit-and- run accident outside her preschool. As Tessa grapples with a terrible grief, made worse by the police's insistence that the case is unsolvable, she finds her only solace in Celia Reed, the therapist her husband has pushed her to see, and in the journal she's keeping, where she compulsively counts the “days without Abby” and maps out her plan for catching the driver who tore her family apart. Tessa becomes consumed with the hunt for her daughter's killer, resolving that if the police won't do anything...she will. Celia warns Tessa that a crusade for answers won't stop her pain, but finds that their emotional sessions open the door to problems she's spent years ignoring, forcing her to face the rising tensions in her own life-- her troubled teenage son, her alcoholic ex-husband, and her fragile new marriage. Celia begins to realize that she must come to terms with the tragic mistakes of her own past and the choices that have led her family to the brink of destruction. A haunting portrait of two women whose lives converge unexpectedly when the answers one needs turn out to be the other's only chance for peace, Life Without Summer illuminates connections between love, marriage, truth and forgiveness that no reader will forget.

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Lynne Griffin is a nationally recognized expert on family life. She is the author of Negotiation Generation: Take Back Your Parental Authority Without Punishment (Berkley/Penguin 2007). As the parenting contributor for Boston's Fox 25 Morning News, she appears regularly in the segment Family Works. Lynne teaches in the graduate program of Social Work and Family Studies at Wheelock College, and at Grub Street Writers. She lives outside Boston, Massachusetts with her family. Life Without Summer is her first novel.