Sam is the boy next door to Percy’s family’s summer cabin in rural Canada. They’re summer friends and eventually more over the course of their teen years until something big rips them apart. Decades later Percy returns to town for Sam’s mothers funeral, it’s the first time they’re seeing one another since things fell apart.
Every Summer After feels like summer. It will have you nostalgic for slow summer days, living in bathing suits and flip flops, you can practically smell the sunscreen and feel the mosquito bites. Percy and Sam’s story is told with a dual timeline, the frequent switches between then and now, plus a narrative covering “six summers and one weekend” in little more than 300 pages really keeps the story moving.
I wasn’t exactly blown away by this one (I mean, this is probably THE book of summer ’22, or at least a serious contender for the top and it’s so rare that a much hyped book fully lives up to expectation for me) but I did find Every Summer After quite a treat for summer/beach reading – definitely peak toes in the sand reading! It has a lot of overlap with Christina Lauren’s Love and Other Words and I found that story to be more impactful.
That Bookish Life 