Every Summer After by Carley Fortune

Thank you ,Berkley for my gifted review copy of Every Summer After by Carley Fortune. This post may contain links to purchase books & you can read our affiliate disclosure here. 

This was one of my most anticipated reads of the summer. A friends to lovers type of romance. Time jumps from the past to the present. Grief. We know I love a love story with a grief element. It had all the elements that usually work for me.

Synopsis for Every Summer After by Carley Fortune

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. 

Book Review: Every Summer After by Carley Fortune

It started off strong. There’s a hook. Something happened between Sam & Percy. They haven’t spoken in years, but they’re brought back together by a tragic event. Percy heads back to Barry’s Bay – to face Sam and face her past.

I liked Percy fine. She’s complicated, and somewhat detached from emotion. We see her face the emotional return to where she spent her summers and spent so much time with Sam.

BUT…the TWIST! The author teases it from the get go. What happened between these lovers that has kept them apart for all these years.

The setting is idyllic, cute and I can picture it even now. The author’s writing is easy to follow and I breezed through the pages.

BUT…the TWIST. I guessed it very early on I dreaded it. I hoped it wasn’t true, and it was. It left me angry and frustrated. For me, the ending wrapped up and kind of mashed things together rather than really processing them. It just didn’t work for me.

The Verdict

I am Kind of Into This book. I enjoyed it enough that I would pick up Carley’s next book in a heartbeat.

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