Road-tripping with an audiobook has become one of my favorite Joe-and-me things to do. We no longer take long trips without a book planned. While traveling with Joe is always a pleasure, listening to a book together makes the journey so much better, like the sweet whipped cream atop an already yummy dessert. It helps reduce driving stress, too. Sharing our book thoughts makes for enjoyable conversation and, bonus, counts as writing research. This Every Summer After book review allows me to spread book love, gain some writing insight, and help others find their next great read.
Win, win, win, double win.
After all that, I’d be remiss not to mention that we use Audible.com for our audiobook needs… (not a shameless plug).
What first drew me to Every Summer After was the gorgeous cover. A beach girl, I’m taken in by the blue hues of the sky and water mixing in a romantic swirl. Fortune’s latest book, Meet Me at the Lake is similarly inviting (and will be a book we listen to on a future trip). The cover of Every Summer After also boasts a recommendation from another road-tripping favorite, Emily Henry, who called it “a radiant debut.”
Here’s Amazon’s Every Summer After book blurb:
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.
Pretty good blurb, right?
Told from a shifting perspective, past to present to past, we first get to know Percy in the present. She’s a well-put-together mess… in a good way. While independent with a decent career and living in the city, she is emotionally stunted, incapable of meaningful relationships with men because she’s still heartbroken about the one who got away—Sam. His mother’s death brings her back to the small lakeside town she left twelve years earlier.
Sam is an old soul, studious and smart, and charming in a loveable nerd kind of way. When Percy and Sam become friends as kids, it’s so warm and sweet that you can’t help but fall in love with them, too. The reader is immediately pulled into the story, desperate to know why their idyllic love was shattered and if they can ever fix it.
The back and forth between past and present can get discombobulating, especially listening in the car with traffic, but that’s why the 30-second rewind button was invented.
And there are so many great tropes at play here… the girl next door, friends to lovers, second chance, soul mates, long-distance, coming of age… ah, I could go on. But Carley Fortune is such a fantastic writer that she keeps you too engaged in the story to notice the bits and bobs (that’s British for the little things).
The best thing about the book is Carley Fortune’s writing. She gets an A+ with extra credit for her mesmerizing descriptions and skillful prose. She truly knows how to craft a story.
The only thing that keeps me from a five-star Every Summer After book review is Sam.
Ugh, I hate myself for saying that. I love Sam’s, as a rule. In my Delilah Duffy Mystery Series (and first published books), my heroine’s love interest is… you guessed it!… SAM!
So, it pains me to say that Joe and I struggled with Sam Florek sometimes. We loved him but hated his choices regarding Percy. She would’ve rolled her body across hot coals for him (and emotionally, she did), but regardless of his love for her, he always kept her at a distance. He set the rules and tone for their relationship, which eventually backfired on him—hard. And what teenage boy would ever say we’re too young? Sure, part of growing up is making dumb decisions, and yes, his confidence that things would always work out between them is endearing. But not realistic. That Sam’s father died at a young age, leaving his mother to raise two boys without him, one would think he’d be less likely to take Percy’s love for granted. Or let Percy suffer twelve years of his silence.
But the story’s ironies somehow enhance it, giving us ample book thoughts and things to discuss. So, we highly recommend it—a great beach read or road-trip listen.
Here are a few of my takeaways from my Every Summer After book review from a writer’s point of view…
Just add celery…
At least twice in the story, Carley Fortune uses the word celery to describe a color. This struck Joe and me funny (yes, we hit pause) because it was such an unusual word choice for green. We didn’t exactly care for it, but it’s an example of her boldness in description—something I desperately need to work on. I tend to fall back on what I’m really good at, which is dialogue. Instead, I need to embrace the celery and develop my craft with descriptions. Carley Fortune proves that description done the right way can be just as engaging as action and dialogue.
If Carley Fortune and/or Emily Henry taught a masterclass on how to write engaging descriptions, I’d be the first to sign up.
There’s that shift again…
It seems like most books I pick up these days have a shifting perspective, either between characters or time periods. It’s like the book version of watching a tennis match.
Is this a trend? Or am I just catching on to a cool way of doing things?
As a writer, I wonder how they do it. Do they write the story chronologically and then split it up? Or do they pen it this way, in shifting order? And somehow manage to keep it all straight?
My head hurts just thinking about it.
Either way, it’s made me consider trying it out because it does create suspense. We keep reading back and forth because we can’t wait to get to the part where things fell apart. WE MUST KNOW WHY!!
The People We Meet On Vacation by Emily Henry is another recent example of this (and a similar story, by the way). In that story, Poppy and Alex haven’t vacationed together in two years because of a devastating falling out. But it takes a good portion of the book to discover what happened to drive them apart.
Just last weekend, I read All Your Perfects by Colleen Hoover… and again, shifting perspective. And I almost didn’t buy it for this reason… ugh, another back-and-forth story. But I’m glad I did—this one will be my next review, so stay tuned.
The point is that a good story might be made better using this tactic because it capitalizes on a reader’s need-to-know.
So, to sum up my Every Summer After book review and other random thoughts…
Best way to pass time during a road trip—audiobooks!
Every Summer After by Carley Fortune—read it!
Carley Fortune masterclass on writing prose—YES!! Do it, Carley!
For more on writing, books, and the books I’ve written, including my upcoming contemporary romance, One Thing Better, now available for ARC reviews, visit my website and join below for a free book!
