Author: Carley Fortune
# of Pages: 320 (ebook)
Genre: Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Synopsis: 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.
Review: Fans of The Notebook will love this book!! (I did NOT like The Notebook).
Every Summer After is about two childhood friends, Sam and Persephone (Percy). Their love story is told from Percy's perspective and each chapter jumps between their childhood and their present day at age 30. The author is building toward revealing some secret on why Percy and Sam haven't seen each other for over a decade, which because more and more obvious as the book progresses.
The problem with this style of storytelling is twofold:
1. In the present day, Sam and Percy already have some sort of romantic history. When they're together, they're already supposed to have some sort of chemistry that the reader hasn't learned about yet since the childhood chapters are running in parallel. It made me feel like I was privy to something that I wasn't a part of, which hurt my early investment in their love story.
2. Readers have to hear about a teenage love story despite this being targeted toward adults. I didn't find depiction nor the dialogue for the characters as children to be particularly realistic. This part of the story was also more slice of life that felt like stalling so that the "big secret" isn't revealed too quickly.
Even after I learned more about the Sam and Percy, I didn't ever actually like either of them. Both of them had issues you could chalk up to immaturity but also these two created this "tragedy" of not being in each others lives for so long because they don't talk to each other! My feelings aside for them as individuals, I don't think they're actually better together (I actually think Percy is better matched with a different character in the book).
The whole "love conquers all" trope that is present in both this book and The Notebook always gives me the ick because the author usually makes the characters behave morally questionably to prove this point (e.g. a character could lie or cheat / someone might illogically forgive these nefarious actions in the name of "love").
Not really a love story worth reading.
