Every Other Weekend

In the year following her parents' divorce, highly imaginative eight-year-old Nenny has a creeping premonition that something terrible will happen, and when this hunch comes true in the most unexpected of ways, she must deal with the fallout.

"The year is 1988, and sun-scorched Southern California is full of broken homes. Nenny is a simultaneously precocious and nervous eight-year-old, adjusting to a newly rearranged life after her parents split. Nenny and her mother and two brothers have just moved in with her new stepfather and his two kids. With her old life replaced by this unfamiliar configuration, Nenny's natural anxieties intensify, and both real and imagined dangers entwine: earthquakes and home invasions, ghosts of her stepfather's days in Vietnam, Gorbachev knocking down the door of her third-grade class and recruiting them all into the Red Army. Knock-kneed and a little stormy-eyed, she is far too small for the thoughts that haunt her--yet her fears are not entirely unfounded. With an irresistible voice, Zulema Renee Summerfield taps into the unease that was bubbling under the surface of life in America in the 1980s, bottles it, and serves it up in devastating, heartfelt, and even occasionally hilarious doses. Every Other Weekend beautifully and unsettlingly captures the terrible wisdom that children often possess, as well as the surprising ways in which families fracture and re-form."--Dust jacket.