Every Summer After
"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 she has felt too true. Instead of spending summers on the lakeshore of her childhood, she stays home in a stylish apartment in the city, keeping everyone at 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. Eventually that friendship turned into something 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 has always been. But until Percy can confront the decisions she made, they'll never know whether their love is bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past."
Every Summer After by Carley fortune is a true coming-of-age romance told by alternating chapter timelines. One chapter focuses on the now, a decade after the summer that tore everything apart. The next starts when that original plotline does, and both move and develop together.
It is one of my favorite storyline tactics and can really make a good story great, juxtaposing the now with the then. It offers a certain rawness to past wounds in this context.
Both Sam and Percy spectacularly fumble to process the past together. They've both spent the past decade dancing around the issues that have shaken them both to their core. Now, they are forced to confront them (especially with the added stress of Sam's mother's funeral).
As someone who has monumentally messed up and had a large part of themselves cast away, this one hit home. I, too, have been in a dark place where I've wanted nothing more than to push every possible spark of vulnerability out the proverbial window. I think most of us have and battled those unique demons, just as Percy has. It pulled a specific and painful type of nostalgia from within me, and brought it to peace in real time with the plot. It is also a little ironic that, for a novel with heavy themes of time, I started this book when Queen Elizabeth II was alive. I finished it after she had passed, sort of how the two timelines within this story take place before and after Sue's death. I thought that was an interesting parallel and I will always think of it when I think of this particular literary piece.
I love a good read that romanticizes the formative summers, a sparkling shoreline of some kind, and an adorable love interest. Carley Fortune does not disappoint.