Every Summer After

Genre: Contemporary / Romance / Chick-Lit

Book Type: Audio

Author: Carley Fortune

Narrator: AJ Bridel

Pages / Length: 320 pages / 9 hours and 38 minutes

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group (May 10, 2022) / Penguin Audio

Book Description:

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.

Thoughts: I know it's something that doesn't work for everyone, but I love when a book is told in present and past POVs. While not knowing the "secret" early on felt like it dragged on, it was also what lead to the build up and added to the story. This was all the feels of "First Love" and a beach read / easy to read book. I loved reading about Sue's relationship with her sons and loved the characters in this one and how you got to know them to understand why they made the decisions they did when they were younger. This was such a beautiful and heartbreaking book on young love, heartaches, friendship and growing up.

I did this on audio and wasn't able to capture as many of the beautiful quotes as I wish I would have been able to, but it was beautiful and heartbreaking.

Favorite Quotes:

🌊 Back when I still had friends, I'd bring the books to school and read the good bits (as in anything gory or remotely sexy) aloud. At first, I just loved getting a reaction from the girls, loved being the center of attention but with the safety net of someone else's words as the entertainment. But the most horror I read, the more I grew to love the writing behind the story - how the authors made impossible situations believable. I liked how each book was both predictable and unique, comforting and unexpected. Safe but never boring. (page 10)

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️