Review: Every Summer After

My word, THIS BOOK. It’s hard to believe that Every Summer After is Carley Fortune’s debut novel. I’m sure you’ve been seeing this one everywhere and let me tell you, my friends. The. Hype. Is. Real. If you read only one more book this summer, make it this one.

Here’s the book’s 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 spending summers in cottage country, on the glittering lakeshore of her childhood, she stays in a stylish apartment in Toronto, 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, Percy and Sam had been inseparable. And when Percy returns to the lake, their connection is as undeniable as it had always been. But until she can confront the decisions she made, they’ll never know whether their love is bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past.
Told over the course of six years in the past and one weekend in the present, Every Summer After is a gorgeously romantic look at love and the people and choices that mark us forever.

It’s hard to say exactly what my favourite part of this book was. I just loved everything about it. The writing. The characters. The romance. The setting. The depth of emotions. Gah. SO GOOD.

So, let’s start with the setting. Barry’s Bay is a real place in Ontario, the province I live in. While I didn’t grow up in that exact area, my hometown is on a bay so I had no problem picturing the cottages and what life would have been like there. I loved how easy it was to place myself in Barry’s Bay and found myself kind of nostalgic for past summers, before adulting got in the way.

This novel is, essentially, a romance. But to call it such will signal, to some people, that it’s a simple tale. It is not. Percy and Sam’s story is far from simple, even though it starts out that way as they become friends, and then something more, after Percy’s parents buy the cottage next to the house where Sam, his older brother, and mom live. Something Major happened to cause the pair to break up and, while it’s hinted at throughout and I felt like I knew the reason, the actual revelation was a shock. The pair did not have an easy road to travel to get back to each other but reading as they figured it out was so satisfying.

There’s a lot of grief in this book. Sam’s dad had died a few years before he and Percy meet, and the reason Percy goes back to Barry’s Bay in the present is a tough one to handle. While I do think everyone and their cousin needs to read this book, if you’re going through a particularly rough patch, perhaps wait to read this one.

I really liked how the book was written and the story was told. It started in the present and then moved back in time. It all made sense, with each chapter clearly labeled so you know what timeline you’re in. The story moved forward with each past section providing more information and insight into the now chapters.

The Readers’ Guide in the back of the book was also a great read and shed a bit of light on the how and why of Fortune’s novel. Fortune and her family moved to Barry’s Bay when she was eight and, while her parents sold the house many years ago, she and her husband and children, rent a cottage nearby every summer. In the summer of 2020 (*shudders*), they were able to have an extended stay and she was hit with the need to write a book. Every Summer After is the result. I could feel the nostalgia when I was reading the book and learning more about Fortune’s background made it all make so much sense.

Every Summer After is a must read. I wanted to dive back into Carley Fortune’s debut novel the second I finished it and have plans to reread it next summer. Buy this book, read it, love it, tell everyone you know about it. You won’t be disappointed.

*A copy of this novel was provided by the publisher, Penguin Random House Canada, in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*