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When nine‑year‑old Renate Vale is sent to spend the summer with her grandparents in Wisteria Grove, Georgia, she expects long days of play with her cousins, quiet mornings in the country, and a break from the routines at home. Instead, that summer becomes the first fracture in her childhood — the moment when she begins to understand that the world is not as safe, simple, or kind as she hoped.

Living under Henry and Evelyn Moreau’s roof, surrounded by three older boy cousins, Renate is pulled into a season of confusion, fear, and awakening. Strange moments follow her, memories flicker at the edges of her mind, and the adults around her twist truth into something sharp enough to wound. As the heat settles over Wisteria Grove, Renate starts to sense a quiet, uncanny force moving beneath the ordinary life of the town — something that sees her, hears her, and refuses to let her stay small.

Those Summer Days is the beginning of Renate’s story: tender, unsettling, and unflinchingly honest. A Southern Gothic coming‑of‑age about trauma, resilience, and the first spark of a voice long denied.

About Chandra Martin

Chandra Martin writes fiction that knows where the bodies are buried – and what they left behind.

A Black storyteller working at the intersection of history, memory, and the supernatural, Martin crafts worlds where the past refuses to stay past, where faith and violence live in the same breath, and where love leaves marks that outlast the people who gave it. Her literary speculative fiction roots the extraordinary in the deeply human – the kind of human that Black readers recognize in their grandmothers, their childhood homes, their own survival.

Her prose moves with precision through atmospheric landscapes and imagined realms alike, always circling the same essential truth: the places we inhabit hold us long after we leave. And the people who shaped us never really go.