Title: Every Summer After
Author: Carly Fortune
Publication: May 10, 2022
Publisher: Berkley
Genre: Romance, Coming of Age
Pages: 420
SYNOPSIS: (From Goodreads)
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.
Six summers to fall in love. One moment to fall apart. A weekend to get it right.
REVIEW:
Every Summer After is the perfect mash up of a really great YA Fiction meeting the “Where are they now?” we all wanted every single time. I’m a new fan of Carly Fortune!
What I loved about this book is the suspense it built throughout, which was not what I expected from a romance, fiction novel. The story goes from current times, where Percy is 30, to her teenage years starting at 13 and going into college. I love Sam and Charlie and I love Percy. Each of these three characters is very much the lead at any given point and we watch them develop from 13-15-year-olds until their 20s and then jump to their adult years. It’s so interesting how different they all are, but how close they all remain. Fortune has such a way of writing about her that I felt on the edge of my seat wondering what it was that tore these friends apart and building to the moment we figured it out. I literally said, “No…” out loud when it was finally revealed.
On top of normal teenage angst we get during the teen years, we also get the real problems of them in adult life where everything doesn’t go as planned and you end up doing something you weren’t really expecting. It also touches on grief at the loss of a family member and the emotions that go along with it. Fortune wrote a lifetime of emotions into one well-laid out novel that included personal growth, romance, angst, suspense and more.
A definite ‘can’t put it down’ read that will have you ignoring life’s responsibilities to read just one more chapter. Carly Fortune is going at the top of my TBR pile and I cannot wait to see what else she writes. It is guaranteed to be amazing.
