Every Summer After
BY Carley Fortune
Rating: 4.5/5 Genre: Contemporary Romance Steam: Explicit! Publisher: Berkley Romance Pub Date: May 10, 2022 Thank you Berkley Romance for my Advanced Copy! You're the best! Available: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | BookShop
Every Summer After Synopsis:
Six summers to fall in love. One moment to fall apart. A weekend to get it right.
They say you can never go home again, and for Persephone Fraser, ever since she made the biggest mistake of her life a decade ago, that has felt too true. Instead of glittering summers on the lakeshore of her childhood, she spends them in a stylish apartment in the city, going out with friends, and keeping everyone a safe distance from her heart.
Until she receives the call that sends her racing back to Barry’s Bay and into the orbit of Sam Florek—the man she never thought she’d have to live without.
For six summers, through hazy afternoons on the water and warm summer nights working in his family’s restaurant and curling up together with books—medical textbooks for him and work-in-progress horror short stories for her—Percy and Sam had been inseparable. Eventually that friendship turned into something breathtakingly more, before it fell spectacularly apart.
When Percy returns to the lake for Sam’s mother’s funeral, their connection is as undeniable as it had always been. But until Percy can confront the decisions she made and the years she’s spent punishing herself for them, they’ll never know whether their love might be bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past.
Told over the course of six years and one weekend, Every Summer After is a big, sweeping nostalgic story of love and the people and choices that mark us forever.
CW: Cancer, death of parents (both off screen, one more involved than other), heart attack, cancer, anxiety, panic attack (on page).
Every Summer After Review
This book was so good. I consumed it in one day–in one sitting. I couldn’t put it down. That being said, I do wish it had a bit more to it. I definitely think that this will be a book that will be really well received by people who aren’t romance readers (romance folks will love it too). The dual timelines, the weird moments of teen years together with the regret of adulthood. So a second chance romance from childhood with a touch of “it’s always been you” to it, i.e. Perfection. It’s a lot and Fortune does a fantastic job juggling it all.
Loves:
Percy, Sam, and Charlie were such real, complex characters that I loved going on the journey with. When you start with characters from the age of 12 to 30 there’s a lot of history that you get to venture through. And that’s where the heart of the novel is. The summers of teenage years. Learning and growing and figuring out who you are. It’s just magical and Fortune nails it.
Percy was an amazing main character. She’s not perfect at all, but it’s all the trip ups that really endear her to you. I loved how real she was. The moments of confusion and unsureness were amazing. I was truly rooting for her the entire time and so wanted to know the cause of the breakup.
The plot was phenomenal. I’m a sucker for those “we were close, until we weren’t and now I have to see them again oh no” books and this was it. ALL THE ANGST! And I truly loved how Fortune didn’t make everything alright with the plot. There was the fallout, which did have major implications for both Sam and Percy and everyone in their lives. It didn’t get fixed and there were going to be some lifelong regrets from it and that’s what made it perfect.
Meh:
I know I said the characters were amazing, but I needed more of the NOW. There were twelve years between the “event” and the present happenings. I felt like I got a lot out of the then and not so much of the now. I wanted more conversation between Sam and Percy, exploring who they were now and how they had changed.
There were some unnecessary, in my opinion, side plots in the now that just clunked things up and didn’t give me the emotional-character driven plot of the now. This was truly my only issue with this otherwise perfect book. I wanted to see more development from the characters. I needed more connection between them because twelve years is a VERY long time.
Long Story Short:
Do I recommend this book? Yes! I think that whether you’re a romance reader or not you’ll enjoy it. There are a lot of elements of lit-fic that will make Every Summer After a fantastic read. Yes there are like two explicit scenes in the book but if you aren’t comfortable with them you could easily skip over them and not miss anything. For the romance reader I think you’ll get a lot out of this too. There’s a lot of building of relationships and characters and the angst and tension is at a HIGH in this book. Like so much yearning. I will definitely be getting a physical copy for myself as I need it on my shelf.
If You Liked This One…
This book would be perfect for those who love Emily Henry as it definitely has People We Meet On Vacation and Beach Read energy (I think Book Lovers too but haven’t read that yet so idk).
