Reviews of Summer Brenner's Writing

Praise for Summer Brenner’s writing:

Reviews: Memoir and Non-fiction

INTERVIEW at Rain Taxi about Dust with Jane Rosenberg LaForge

https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2025/02/summer-brenner-dust.html

VIDEO from HILLSIDE CLUB/Panel discussion of memoir

INTERVIEW at Jewish Lens about Dust

REVIEW of Dust by Ava Homa, author of Daughters of Smoke and Fire: A Novel
This memoir caught me off guard in the best way. I fell in love with David, his singing, his humor, his sensitivity, the way he moved through the world with defiance and fragility. Summer Brenner writes about her brother with such intimacy and restraint that his death felt like a personal loss. The same is true for their father and I realized only after the fact how carefully she’d led me there. Dust doesn’t announce itself as heartbreaking, but it is. It’s also tender, funny, and full of quiet beauty. I couldn’t put it down.

INTERVIEW about Dust with Lola Opatayo, host of JOURNEY OF THE ART

2024 NEWS

. . . Much of her fiction and poetry—and especially Dust—spring from her lyrical southern voice. But this is a voice that doesn’t remain in the South, it roams from France to Mexico, Italy to California. It reflects on the complexities of Jewish identity in relation to leftist struggle. It is unabashedly feminist and anti-racist, without a hint of the tortured split between the new ways of life and the old, as is so often a trope of southern voice. In this way, Dust also doesn't apologize for being southern.

—Levi Vonk, "The Paradox of the Contemporary Southern Writer," LITHUB

"Dust," Brenner's new memoir, is about departures and homecomings, the places that shape us and those we leave behind. Her story begins in the segregated South and ends in progressive Northern California. There are poignant scenes and madcap episodes; there's social tumult. Brenner's economical prose yields humor and insight. This is a smart, buoyant and appealing book.

—Kevin Canfield, SF Chronicle

BERKELEYSIDE (Joanne Furio)

BAY CITY BOOKS (Frances Dinkelspiel)

I read your book in one sitting, just gobbling it up. And then I found that when it ended I was so moved that I turned it over in my lap, and started reading it all over again.

—Leah Garchik, former columnist, San Francisco Chronicle

I got my copy of Dust and put my life aside and read it. I was impressed by your generosity, your honesty and the grace on every page. I felt I got to know you in a new way through this tender book and was so moved by you and your writing and by David.

—Mandy Aftel, perfumer and author of Essence and Alchemy and The Museum of Scent