Every Summer After by Carley Fortune
Romance
2023 Frenzied Bibliophile Challenge Category: PopSugar Challenge - First-time Author
Rating: 5/5 starts
Will you like this book? You might if you like:
Coming of Age stories
Dawson’s Creek but thought it ended wrong
Swimming
Second-Chance romances (apparently a theme this month)
Horror movies
I’d seen this book a lot in my Insta feed and there it was on display at the library so I decided to snag it. I can see what the hype was about, this is a well written story about friendship, young love, and coming to terms with the mistakes we make as we grow up.
Percy, our sometimes freckled heroine, begins to spend summers in northern Ontario when her parents buy a summer cabin when she is twelve. She becomes fast friends with her next door neighbors, brothers Charlie and Sam. Sam and Percy are the same age and it is their friendship and eventual love story that forms the basis of the book.
I loved the characters in this story. Fortune does a wonderful job of conveying the awkwardness of first love and the vulnerability inherent in opening yourself to someone. The reader knows Sam is obviously so in love with Percy, but you feel both characters' nervousness and uncertainty as they have their first kiss. And when Percy saw Sam for the first time in 12 years, I wanted to hide with her.
Percy loves horror novels and she begins to write them herself, finding her own voice and talent for creating stories, which she shares with Sam. At one point, Percy describes
how when she wanted to write horror, she spent time studying other authors, studying how they wrote to help her own writing. Fortune must have done something very similar, because this is such an excellent example of the genre. I can’t wait for her next book and I am hoping it is about Charlie!
[Spoiler alert for the below]
I did NOT really see Percy and Charlie sleeping together. I feel like it was hinted at but I was still surprised. And to be honest, I can see why Percy hooked up with him, at that point Sam was all over the place. After I read that part, I wasn’t sure if Fortune was going to switch it up and we were going to see Charlie and Percy together, but I was happy with the ending. But this is what gave me the whole Dawson-Joey-Pacey vibe
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