Reviews

The Summer of Bitter and Sweet - By Jen Ferguson

Rating: 3.5/5 Reviewed by: Vivian, Grade 12
The Summer of Bitter and Sweet is a powerful story about an Indigenous girl in Canada, and her struggles with mental health, substance abuse, racism, sexual harassment and assault. This novel opens the readers eyes to the daily traumas faced by people of color, especially Indigenous women and girls. At the beginning of each chapter, there are little bits of information about ice cream and sorbet flavors that relate to the content that is in each chapter (for context, the main character works at an ice cream shop). I thought those little paragraphs were really cute… However, for me, the novel's content was really heavy but informative. I liked how much the author went into detail, regarding the protagonist's feelings. I personally really resonated with the main character Lou, because she has a similar personality to mine! There is a lot of family and relationship conflict in this novel, where some of it is really intense. With that said I think that all the characters were written extremely well. There were some characters (the dad and boyfriend)  which I absolutely could not stand. There were points in the novel where I really wanted to stop reading, because of them, but to be honest that was one of the things that made the story good. The plot went at a nice speed. Not too fast, not too slow. As the story progressed more problems started to happen and get solved. There were also some parts of the story that talked about indigenous culture, which was really interesting! Overall, I enjoyed the book. It gave me a new perspective on life, however if you plan on reading this novel, I think you should mentally prepare and research about the content in the novel beforehand.