I received an arc of this title from NetGalley for an honest review. Tried to get into this story a few times and it just did not pique my interest.

I find it quite hard to rate this without first re-reading the other three books in Smith's Quartet. There was so much packed into the 300+ pages of the story--so many characters, so many threads from the first three books, so much about current events, (especially British), so much word-play, so much art.  Much too much at times, so that I often felt overwhelmed and tired as I read. (But in these pandemic days, I often feel that way.) Having said that, Smith's prose and characters pulse with life and for readers with access to the first three books (or for readers whose memory is superior to my own) this would be an amazing reading experience.

“Summer” is variously defined here as a lintel (the most important beam, structurally, in a building), as a horse that can carry a great weight, as the season most overloaded with our expectations. That’s a lot of pressure for Ali Smith to put on her own Summer — the final volume in her Seasonal quartet — but, too, Smith writes: “Summers can take it. That’s why we call them summers.” Once again, Smith has released a volume written completely in the moment (she may have started this thinking her themes would continue to concentrate on climate change, the rise of right wing politics, and refugee detainee camps, but she was able to organically include COVID-19 and the death of George Floyd as though her narrative had been inevitably moving towards those world-changing events all along), and taken together, I simply can’t imagine a more appropriate encapsulation and exploration of our moment in time. I think that Summer did an amazing job of tying everything together, and while Autumn was the absolute standout of the series for me, and although the other three in the quartet merited four stars on their own, this is definitely a five star series overall; I can imagine this being read and studied deep into the future and look forward to soon rereading all four as a cohesive experience.