Every Summer After by Carley Fortune
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.
Review: As a middle schooler, Persephone Fraser's parents bought a summer lake house and she quickly becomes friends with the boy next door, Sam Florek. Over six summers, they grow increasingly inseparable, and their friendship develops into something more. But flash forward twelve years, and the two have not seen each other in over a decade and have lost contact. Until Percy returns to the lake for Sam's mother's funeral and the two find that their connection is as strong as it ever was.
This novel was told in alternating sections of the present day and then going back in time twelve years. The two sections move closer and closer together in time as the novel progressed and the story builds up to reveal what broke the couple apart twelve years ago and also what has brought them back together now. The pacing was really well done and really spurred the novel along as the tension builds to learn what broke these two up and if it can be resolved now after all these years. Percy and Sam also have great chemistry together and I did love the dynamics of them being each other's first love and knowing each other so well from middle school onwards.
However, I was disappointed in multiple elements of this book. First off, - and I am so sorry - but her name being Persephone who goes by Percy for short was very off putting to me. I loved Sam's character, but Percy frustrated me throughout. She is constantly talking out loud without realizing it. And seems to have so many panic attacks by the end of the book that it sounds like she needs serious intervention. She strings along her first boyfriend Mason, despite him being an absolute catch by all accounts who is a good guy to her. By the end, I thought she was just sort of a bad person for how she treats multiple people in her life including Sam, Mason, and her friend Deliliah. Sam's brother Charlie is also a big a**hole for how he treats his brother's crush throughout.
I also don't have a lot of patience for the type of conflict that this couple supposedly struggles with. In short, they just fail to communicate with one another, which leads to major miscommunication. And then, instead of finally talking about it, they instead decide to go TWELVE YEARS without speaking? I also found the analogies and language used in this book lazy. I didn't feel like the author was even trying to be creative or unique in her writing style. For instance, at one point Percy describes making out with Sam by saying, "His mouth was a warm cave that I wanted to explore." Every analogy in the book felt this second rate.
There really were some great elements to this book. But my dislike for Percy, my frustration over the way the characters handled what was supposedly the great love of their lives, and the quality of the writing really dimmed my enjoyment.
Stars: 3
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