Invincible Summers

Invincible Summers is a gorgeous meditation on history and family, innocence and experience. Robin Gaines has created an unforgettable character in Claudia, but by following her through eleven years of her life, she shows us how each one of us is many characters throughout a single lifetime. Her voice and sensibility changes, and we change with her, as the years pass and events alter her time and place and self.

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Praise for Invincible Summers

“Invincible Summers is a gorgeous meditation on history and family, innocence and experience. Robin Gaines has created an unforgettable character in Claudia, but by following her through eleven years of her life, she shows us how each one of us is many characters throughout a single lifetime. Her voice and sensibility changes, and we change with her, as the years pass and events alter her time and place and self. At the end of this novel, we’ve lived alongside of Claudia, and the world’s many mysteries, and those of the human heart, have been laid bare. This is the kind of reading experience for which literature was invented.”

—Laura Kasischke, author of Space, in Chains, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2012.

“Invincible Summers explores the agony of family. The story begins with the death of Claudia Goodwin’s father, and then plunges into the murkier emotional trouble that follows for years. Through the 1960s and 70s, the world around Claudia moves on. But her loss walks along with her. Gaines deftly manages that loss and the way it floats through time—not shrinking but morphing, not fading but fusing to all of Claudia’s experiences. As the chapters progress through two tumultuous decades, they show how parents fumble their own children, how siblings abandon one another, and how people become itinerant and self-destructive. This is no simplistic tale of self-discovery, nor is it a dirge. It is, in Claudia’s own words, a restless search for nowhere fueled by moments of whimsy, humor, and hope. I am glad to have read Gaines’s fine debut novel and look forward to her next.”

—John Mauk, author of Field Notes for the Earthbound and The Rest of Us

About the Author

Robin Gaines is the author of the novel-in-stories, Invincible Summers, forthcoming in May 2016 from ELJ Publications. Her short stories and essays can be found in Slice, Crack the Spine, Spindrift, Oasis: A Literary Magazine, Willard & Maple, The Homestead Review, Current Magazine, and Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine.

Invincible Summers was a semi-finalist for The Iowa Short Fiction & John Simmons Short Fiction Award for 2014. She received her MA in journalism from Michigan State University and worked as a research intern at Rolling Stone while freelancing for various music publications. Robin’s interviewed or reviewed acts as diverse as Peter, Paul and Mary to Alice in Chains. Music, or the business of music, finds its way into much of her fiction.

She tries to blog twice a month here about all things literary, but the subject matter usually veers off course into the perils and joys of being human.

Currently, Robin is working on another novel that keeps her up most nights thinking about its characters. She is a member of the Detroit Working Writers and the Metro Detroit Book & Author Society. Born in Detroit, she lives half the year outside of Ann Arbor and the other half on a lake in Petoskey, Michigan.

Invincible Summers

Praise for Invincible Summers

About the Author

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