The Never-Ending Summer: The joyful escape we all need right now

As if time weren't hard enough in the Go Getting Ladies business during these trying times, Ms Kennedy comes along with a series of baseless allegations of exploitation, misogyny and sausages. My secretary was appalled. Appalled! I had to give her the week off.Seriously, an enjoyable read, even though it's not my usual sort of thing (ie, no-one gets murdered. Spoiler). Emma has a light and witty touch, backed up with ferocious period research. She's really good at talking about women's empowerment at what was a crucial moment (I remember my parents arguing about the Miss World demo at around that time), but without it feeling like a manifesto. Well worth your time.

I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy this book at first, but I was intrigued by the storyline, and I'm very pleased that I read it to the end. A 'coming of age' story featuring some very strong and inspiring women and a few men too. It is set in 1971 at a time when feminism was coming into it's own and breaking down those walls built up by women of the 'domestic goddess' era..A young woman and her friend set off on an adventure to find themselves and live a little before they settle down...at the same time, the mum of one of the women decides to take off her apron and do the same thing. This story is a wonderful inspiration to many and I thank the author for writing this story and using some of her own life experiences to give us a look at life as it was then. I was born a year later into a generation that took it all within our stride, so it was nice to have been given a personal perspective of life as it transitioned from Sixties to the Seventies.

A disappointing return to the 1970s in Emma Kennedy’s The Never-Ending Summer which never quite lived up to the inspirational and heart-warming billing for me. Bea Morgan and Agnes Ledbury have been best-friends for as long as they can remember, and at the age of twenty are coming to the end of their time at the secretarial college where they have reluctantly found themselves. Having just read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, however, they decide it’s high time they started asserting themselves and more importantly, lost their virginity, in a bid to become authentic second-wave feminists. Both awkward outsiders they tell their parents, who bizarrely ask no questions, that they are off to Europe and the very next day they travel to London for a summer of sex in the city with accommodation sorted. Disappointingly there is no attempt at filling in any details or adding colour with the author apparently too lazy to make the story more credible or add depth which gave me no incentive to care as a reader. Agnes’s mother, Florence, is forty-six and her daughter flying the nest for the summer gives her time to reflect on her own marriage to a man she barely knows, let alone communicates with, and a life of obligation and drudgery. That and a quick skim through The Female Eunuch and she sets off for her own summer of discovery through France and Italy, intending to find out what she really wants from life.What follows is the next five weeks as they unfold, moving between the perspectives of all the main players in the story, including Florence’s husband, William, at home in Oxford. Sadly none of it proved particularly riveting and whilst I can understand what Emma Kennedy was attempting to illustrate with the book I found it too skimpily characterised for the intended messages to hit home. Although the book stretches to nearly 500 pages the story is woefully underdeveloped and all three of the main characters lack depth, but it is Bea and Agnes, who spoke and acted like fourteen-year-olds instead of the twenty-year-olds they actually are, that I had the most difficultly investing in. They seem to have very little real understanding of sex and are incredibly emotionally immature and just didn’t ring true. Despite not being born in 1971 I was also rather skeptical about the supposed abundance of research and questioned the dialogue on a number of occasions, including doubting that any twenty-year-old would dare mention having sex or orgasms in front of their mother. The novel ties up with all the life lessons every character seems to have learned over the course of their journeys, yet looking back there is so little supporting evidence that I really feel I may have been reading a different novel.

I quite enjoyed this, the idea of breaking free and escaping is very inviting. Some good jokes too! Somehow it just didn't capture the atmosphere of the early seventies for me as I remember them. Baby buggy? Bootcut trousers? We'd never heard of those, it was all pushchairs and bell bottoms in my day! Just little details of the vernacular that make an era feel familiar.

Thank you for writing such an engaging story that really captured what I recall & understand from that era. Honesty, frustration and courage are as prevalent today as back then, just in a different context.