Summertime

Travel Guide

Real photos of the hurricane and information about what happened – keyshistory.org

Summer time but unlike the song, the livin is far from easy…

A Fourth of July beach barbecue, in a small Florida village where many war veterans live sounds like an idyllic place to be. but the horror of what happens next will turn the peace on its head. And that is long before the hurricane comes around.

The layers of tension are wrapped tight so by the time you peel them off, you feel the pressure and shock as each layer comes off – the racial undertone, the racial hatred and segregation, the men returning from war abandoned and deceived…Added to that the humidity and oppressive heat, and there is more than one type of storm brewing. For the weather is a character and setting here reflecting the action in the village of Heron Bay

“Three hundred miles to the south, a tropical storm passes over the Bahamas. On the verge of dissipating, it receives a sudden mammoth infusion of energy from the super-heated waters below.”

The real life event of the hurricane – which hit the island of Islamorada and the other keys in 1935 on Labor Day and was a category 5 storm. It was not something we knew anything about if we’re honest and to have this as a focus and a backdrop of the novel is a fascinating concept. And the fact that we discover Ernest Hemingway lived there at the time and helped with the clear up operation.

The veterans who had fought in the war came to the keys in order to join a government works programme. They were basically  forgotten and abandoned by the government and so had come here to try ad rebuild their lives. They were outsiders however and their reentry into normal life was tough enough without the approaching storm.Their living conditions were fragile shacks.

So, it was the veterans’ story which  the author says she wanted to tell