Mia's 30 year old marriage is on Pause, so she spends a summer with her mother and her aging and ailing friends, and teaches poetry to seventh grade girls. The book is a pleasant intellectual meditation about women, love, marriage, aging, adolescent girls. The best parts of the book are when she writes about the dynamics of the 7 young girls, however when Hustvedt writes about the differences of the sexes, it reads more like an essay or a semi-scientific article, than a novel. Overall The Summer Without Men is a less satisfying novel, than her What I Loved.