Every Summer After by Carley Fortune
Genre: NA Realistic Fiction
Blurb (on back of book): 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 look at love and the people and choices that mark us forever.
MY OPINION: ****
I wasn't expecting to like this book because it features all of the tropes that I hate and is considered similar to Emily Henry's writing, which I'm also not the biggest fan of. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book was beautifully-written, angsty, full of romance and heartbreak, and perfect for the summertime. It was sort of similar to <i>The Summer I Turned Pretty</i> but not really; I definitely thought it was the exact same book at the beginning though.
So I typically hate second chance romance and I also do not like flashbacks back and forth from the past to the present. However, I was willing to forgive this one because the flashbacks were actually enjoyable (unlike PWMOV) and felt integral to understanding the story. It wasn't just annoying backstory for the sake of adding length to the book, which I often feel like flashbacks do.
The story follows Persephone "Percy" Fraser who spent every summer of her childhood at a lake-side summer home. Coincidentally, she lived next door to two brothers, Sam and Charlie, and of course, she finds herself in love with one of them (Sam). They're a perfect pair and both of them seem to understand each other completely, despite only really seeing each other every summer for a couple of months. However, some falling-out occurred and she hasn't seen Sam or Charlie in years.
At least, until she receives a call from Charlie telling her to return to the lake house for the funeral of their mother.
To be quite honest, this premise didn't really appeal to me. I don't care about friends-to-lovers at all and I definitely do not care about second-chance romance and the whole reuniting thing. However, I did really like Sam, Charlie, and Percy and found it to be a quite interesting dynamic. All of them make their fair share of mistakes and they don't act like they're perfect. They also don't really blame each other but mostly blame themselves, making them more complicated characters.
I know a lot of people say the ending is unforgivable and they rated it poorly because of it but to be quite honest, I didn't see it to be that big of a deal. Without spoiling, something happens between certain characters that people saw as bad but honestly, one of them was confused and hurt and clearly under the mindset that something had happened that actually didn't. I don't condone what they did but it wasn't some horrific thing that years and years of not speaking didn't make up for. They were punished for what happened enough to the point where it's like, I think it's time to start forgiving.
Sam and Percy were cute but I definitely did not think of them as some amazing, would-die-for couple. I would say they ranked very mediocre in my list of favorite couples but at least I didn't hate either of them. I did think both of them were fairly annoying but it wasn't to the point of hatred so I consider that a win.
For a debut novel, the writing in this book was immaculate. I never found myself too bored by anything and I found the descriptions very well-done, the romance cute, and the angst dialed up to the generic romance book level. It didn't pack the same punch as TSITP as people told me, but it was definitely cute. It would have been top-tier if it were dual POV.
I would recommend this book to readers looking for their next summer read, though I'm sure you all have read this one already.
Main Character: Percy
Sidekick(s): Sam, Charlie, etc
Villain(s): Misunderstandings, etc
Realistic Fiction Elements: This book was all very real to life.
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