The Summer of my Fifteenth Year

Geri Spencer Hunter is a formidable storyteller who has crafted a genuine masterpiece with The Summer of My Fifteenth Year. When 86-year old Etta Mae Netter sits down to record her personal history, she releases a torrent of closely held family secrets that threaten to engulf her even after 71-years. Geri Hunter deftly draws us into the lives of the Netters, a well-to-do Black family living what appears to be an idyllic life in a small Iowa town during the tough times of the late 1930’s. She takes us back to that summer when fifteen-year-old Etta and the rest of her family awaited the return from college of their golden boy, Charleston Epstein Netter. With clean, clear prose, and unflinching gaze, Hunter brilliantly explores and ultimately exposes the secret born of that summer, the kind of secret that destroy girls but leave the men imposing them untouched. A secret that brings a whole family to its knees. A secret that nearly destroyed Etta, but left Charleston unscathed. Seventy-one-years later the pain that never left is finally exorcised by the telling. —Terris McMahan Grimes, author of Smelling Herself: A Novel