Tessa Gray's life changes forever when she loses her four-year-old daughter, Abby, in a hit-and-run accident outside her preschool. Once a vivacious, joyful mother and wife, Tessa now spends her days holed up in Abby's room, sleeping in her bed, clutching Abby's Tootsie Rabbit stuffed animal - anything to keep her memories close. As Tessa grapples with a terrible grief, made worse by the police's insistence that the case is unsolvable, she finds solace in Celia Reed, the therapist her husband has pushed her to see, and in the journal she's keeping, where she compulsively counts the "days without Abby" and maps out her plan for catching the driver who tore her family apart.

As Celia struggles to keep Tessa from getting caught up in a bleak crusade for answers, she finds that their sessions open the door to emotions that she's spent years ignoring, forcing her to face the rising tensions in her life - her troubled teenage son, her alcoholic ex-husband, and her fragile new marriage. Celia begins to realize that she must come to terms with the tragic mistakes of her past and the choices that have led her family to their own brink of destruction.

A haunting portrait of two women whose lives converge unexpectedly, Life Without Summer illuminates connections between love, marriage, truth, and forgiveness no listener will forget.

Lynne Griffin has spent more than 20 years as a child development and behavior management consultant. She is the author of Negotiation Generation: Take Back Your Parental Authority Without Punishment (Berkley/Penguin, 2007). She is the parenting contributor for Boston's Fox 25 Morning News where she regularly appears in the segments Family Works and Parenting and the News. Her writers' group has been featured in the Boston Globe and the Patriot Ledger. She lives in Scituate, Massachusetts with her family. This is her first novel.