Stephanie Sullivan: Review - Every Summer After

TITLE: Every Summer After

RATING: ★★★★★

Summary (from Goodreads): 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 look at love and the people and choices that mark us forever.

Six summers to fall in love. One moment to fall apart. A weekend to get it right.

REVIEW: As a reader and also an author, this can sometimes cause a disruption when it comes to reading and reviewing. With this book, I bounced back and forth between so many different emotions from a reader’s perspective but also an author’s point of view. Now…let me explain. As a reader, I was instantly caught up in the dynamic between the main characters, Sam and Percy. It was so endearing to witness how their relationship grew from friendship to first love, and oh the memories it brought back from my younger years. (My first love was also named Sam, so yeah…there’s that too). I loved how these characters were flawed and fought for their relationship. You won’t find a Hallmark channel couple here, and I personally loved that. Give me something REAL any day - real struggles, real imperfections - nothing sappy and unrelatable. Now, as an author, I will admit I stopped many times after reading some of Carley’s lines, just awestruck and thinking to myself, “Damn, I wish I’d come up with that”. Knowing this is her debut novel only adds to my admiration of her work. This book will stay with me a long time, and I recommend it to everyone.