PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksIn lesser hands, these books would degenerate into Pollyanna both-sidesism: if only we could all get along! Smith skirts the trap, but never falls in ... Weaving Robert’s story with Sacha’s and Grace’s experiences, and all of them with Daniel’s flee from Nazism into a British internment camp, Iris’s lifelong activism, and Art’s and Charlotte’s writing projects, Summer becomes an intergenerational patchwork illustrating both the trends of our times and a meditation on time itself ... What makes the Seasonal Quartet such a pleasure is the way its writing forms its own response. Smith fills the novels with literary flourishes in the form of communication failures: wordplay and references and assumptions that disclose different ways of seeing the world ... Few authors can match her playful, wrenching prose ... Expressing the novel and the historical at the same time, finding it in the marrow of our deepest, most ordinary selves, is the Seasonal Quartet’s greatest achievement. But it’s also what makes reading Summer during this summer so strange, much less in the fall ... At times, Summer can feel too ephemeral for the weight of these times. Yet I’ve also found myself recommending them more and more the worse things have become. Maybe their levity is just the reminder we need.
