Summer Point is the first novel by New Brunswick poet and playwright Linda McNutt. Its cover, part of a Cormorant Books redesign by Toronto designer Bill Douglas, is dark and elegant.

This is a carefully constructed novel, but it has the informality and familiar feel of a summer home. More sentimental than confessional, Summer Point reveals an author with a clear vision of the past, its uses, and its profound implications for the future.

A weekend at the family cottage turns into a summer of discovery when the father of nine-year-old Sarah is rushed to the hospital with a serious heart attack. Her pregnant mother remains at his side, leaving Sarah alone with her eccentric middle-aged and elderly family members.

From a distance, her parents struggle with the life and death questions that a serious illness, and later a new baby, inevitably give rise to. Sarah is concerned mainly with the serious business of being a kid. Returning to the cottage as an adult and its new owner, she remembers and reflects upon those long-ago summer months, the new-found freedom to explore, and the bitter-sweetness of her findings.

A grown and wise Sarah narrates the story, but her adult voice is weaker and secondary to the feelings and observations of the child she remembers being. Characters are drawn with clarity in a series of anecdotes that suggest that these may be people from McNutt’s own life.

Whether or not Summer Point is autobiographical, this clarity is the novel’s strength and its heart. The reader meets the hovering Aunt Wynd who “never sat down to eat, but nibbled out of saucers like an insecure and wary cat.” McNutt describes the cooling and calming effects of a peppermint, produced at a crucial moment from the dusty folds of Uncle K’s trouser pocket. And she takes us along the shores of New Brunswick’s Northumberland Strait, a place where one could be “complete, ecstatic, wind-wrapped, and gloriously free.”

A great deal of this novel’s charm is the way it evokes familiar people and places. Not all readers will make this connection, a fact that will lessen the book’s appeal to a wider audience. But for those of us who recognize Sarah’s family cottage, McNutt’s debut makes a cozy summer read.