By Kathy Guithe
If you have read Eat Pray Love, by Liz Gilbert, the gripping travel memoir of an American woman who finds herself and so much more when she eats in Italy, prays in India and finds love in Indonesia, An Afternoon in Summer will leave you dissatisfied.
The allure of the cover and the synopsis on the back cover, which harbors hints of Eat Pray Love, is enough to entice a reader to read the book, but once past the first couple of chapters, it starts to get a little repetitive.
An Afternoon in Summer follows an American university professor and single mother who takes a year off, packs up her children and sets up house in Rarotonga.
Being a memoir, you can't really criticize the fact that the book begins on quite a depressing note because everything goes wrong when they arrive in Rarotonga, because that's reality.
I don't blame Kathy for being inspired by Eat Pray Love, if indeed she was. The idea of Eat Pray Love was the author going through a horrible divorce resulting in depression and went to find herself and ended up finding herself and other people and eventually love along the way.
An Afternoon in Summer follows this exact same track but without the witty language and gripping scenarios. Two years after reading Eat Pray Love, a number of things still stick in my mind. Two weeks after reading An Afternoon in Summer, I barely remember a thing, just a mass of adjectives describing sunsets and fruit trees.
