Even if you are not someone who seeks romance novels, I highly suspect you will love Every Summer After by Carley Fortune. This book is part sweet, angsty friends-to-lovers YA romance and part steamy, heartbreaking second chance adult romance. I would recommend Every Summer After to teen and adult readers alike!

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The summary, from Amazon:

“A radiant debut.”—Emily Henry,#1 New York Times bestselling author of Book Lovers

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

Named One of the Hottest Reads of Summer 2022 by Today ∙ Parade ∙ PopSugar ∙ USA Today ∙ SheReads ∙ BuzzFeed ∙ BookBub ∙ Bustle ∙and more!

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.

Buy Every Summer After here.

This dual timeline story is incredibly easy to follow. Percy gets a call from Charlie, the big brother of her ex, Sam, that their mother has died. She heads back to the lake where she spent her summers as a teen, the small town where Sam and Charlie grew up, to attend their mother’s funeral. It’s been over a decade since she last spoke to Sam, but she’s been pining for him this entire time. Through flashback chapters, each showcasing one of six summers the two spent together, we watch Sam and Percy grow up and fall in love. These two were best friends and always loved one another, and eventually a romance developed. But when they broke up during their freshman year of college, both were left heartbroken and neither ever got over the other. Now that they have finally reunited, old habits and feelings are impossible to forget.

Wow, what an emotional read. I read the first chapter in bits and pieces over a day or two, then sat down on a Monday and between slow periods at work and an evening staying up past my bedtime with one too many glasses of wine, I devoured this book. I wasn’t sure if I had a hangover the next morning from the wine, the tears I cried, or the book itself. Ultimately, I loved that this was a story of forgiveness. All of the characters hurt one another – Sam hurts Percy and Delilah (Percy’s friend), Percy and Charlie hurt Sam, Delilah and Percy hurt one another. But in the end, these best of friends are able to forgive one another every time and always come back to one another, which I think is so true of the friends we make during adolescence. Every Summer After is romantic and sad and beautiful. It was everything teen me wanted to read with some steamy adult moments thrown in as well, though I think it’s appropriate for teens who can handle that sort of material. This was a one-of-a-kind novel about friendship, soulmates, and second chances. I rate it 5 stars!

Every Summer After by Carley Fortune
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This actually only took me 1 day to read. Read 20 pages the first two days and then devoured the other 285 in one day. Wow. WOW. Part YA friends to lovers, part adult second chance, full angst. I’m an emotional WRECK.

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Book Club Questions

1. Describe the relationship dynamics between Percy and Sam, Sam and Charlie, Percy and Charlie, and Percy and Delilah.
2. How does Percy and Sam’s relationship grow and change over the course of the novel?
3. Why are both Percy and Sam’s parents a little hesitant about the intensity of their friendship and burgeoning romance?
4. Do Sam’s fears about dying young impacts his actions and relationships?
5. Many characters in this novel hurt the ones they love, whether that’s their sibling, partner, or friend, but ultimately all of them find their way back to one another. Why is that? Is this healthy? What makes them forgive one another?

Interested? Buy Every Summer After.
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