Let’s start this review with a confession, because I have never heard of Every Summer After by Carley Fortune before the Dutch translation was announced. It’s a really popular book amongst the booktok croud, but I’m not part of it so no wonder I’ve missed it. The announcement of the translation did ring a bell however, I was just not interested by this title enough to pick it up. Unfortunately FOMO and curiosity exist, so I decided to read this book after all.
- Title: Every Summer After
- Author: Carley Fortune
- Publication date: May 10, 2022
- Publisher: Berkley
- ISBN: 9780593438534
- Number of pages: 307
- Genre: Contemporary, GenralFiction, Romance
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.
To start of this review, besides the confession that I’ve had never heard of this book before, I also have to admit that my expectations were very biased. I saw nothing but positive reviews from the Dutch book community AND this book is published by a YA publisher so it’s marketed as a young adult novel. I’m still a sucker for that genre although I’ve outgrown it a little, so I was going into this book expecting a lovely coming of age romance that would be a little bit of a guilty pleassure. Again, please explain me why on earth this book is picked up by a YA publisher? It’s not YA at all! Okay, the chapters from the past are, but the main characters are in their thirties when the main events of the book take place.
Percy and Sam haven’t spoken in twelve years, after that one faithful weekend Percy broke his heart. For six summers, she and her family spent their summer vacation in their holiday residence at the lake in Barry’s Bay. On their first day there, Percy meets her neighbours, a family with two boys. Charlie is a bit older, Sam is her age. From the moment they meet, Percy and Sam are inseperable. They develop a very close friendship which eventually leads to more. Until everything blows up. Twelve years after that faithful weekend, Percy gets a phone call from Charlie with the news their mom has died and they would love for Percy to attend the funeral. Percy leaves all her duties in the city behind and immediately gets to Barry’s Bay. There, she gets swept away by memories of her summers there. Also, she meets Sam again after this long. Their friendship picks up immediately, like they haven’t seen or spoken to eachother in over a decade. Their chemistry and attraction is still there as well. Does Percy have the heart to tell Sam what happened twelve years ago and does Sam have the heart to forgive her?
This story is told in a dual timeline. It starts with Percy receiving the phone call about Sue’s death and Percy deciding to return to Barry’s Bay. From then on, the puzzle is pieced together by alternating between past and present timeline. Honestly, this works pretty well for this particular book. However, the excecution wasn’t as intriguing as I’d hoped.
The book starts of promising. I kept curious about what happened between Sam and Percy and the tention was build up by the many cliffhangers the alternating timelines bring along. Unfortunately, it all got quite repetitive quite fast and the investment got lost. The author just didn’t manage to keep me intrigued the entire time. Also, the “big” revelation was not that big at all and was quite predictable when looking back. Unfortunately, that was the whole point of the plot and it was just so anti-climactic.
Every Summer After by Carley Fortune is not the book I was hoping to get. This partially has to do with expectation management. As I’ve read the Dutch version which is marketed as a YA novel, I’d expected a YA novel. The timeline in the past was YA, but the present timeline absolutely not. Therefor, I don’t think this book counts towards the genre. Although the dual timeline storytelling works really well for this book, I just wasn’t intrigued the entire time by it. The characters were not really likeable, I didn’t really feel chemistry between them. The writing was okay, the plot became repetitive and predictable very quickly. I just wasn’t intrigued by this book, but I understand why it’s such a Booktok hit nevertheless. The content is easy to consume, just what the majority on there loves.
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