Summer might be winding down, but the heat sure isn’t. Take a mental cool down with these summer reads, but reader beware: like the gorgeous, inviting waters of the Puget Sound, these pretty covers hide deep and sometimes dangerous undercurrents.
In Hurricane Summer by Asha Bromfield, not all is fun in the sun for 18-year-old, Canadian-born Tilla when she’s faced with spending the summer with her semi-estranged father at his Jamaican home. There she must learn to navigate a culture and identity she is born to but also outside of against the backdrop of oncoming Hurricane Gustav. In the wreckage left behind, she’ll have to decide what to salvage and what to let go. Alice Storm must navigate a different kind of family dynamic when her father, also the family patriarch, dies and she is forced to return to the extremely wealthy family who cast her out 5 years prior in Sarah MacLean’s These Summer Storms. 15 years ago, everything about Lucy Sinclair’s world changed irrevocably when her father was convicted of murdering 3 people in The Summer That Changed Everything by Brenda Novak. Back in her small coastal hometown to talk to him and find out what really happened that summer, Lucy runs into an old flame fleeing a rocky marriage. She’ll soon discover though that there are some in the tight-knit community who’d rather have the past stay just as it is.
Renting a cottage on a private lake island for a few weeks of no-strings attached fun to break the curses on their unlucky love lives sounds like a great idea for strangers Justin and Emma, until family shows up on the doorstep and things get a whole lot more complicated, especially when real feelings start to surface between them in Abby Jimenez’s Just for the Summer. In One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune, Alice, a successful professional photographer, is itching for something more in her life. When Alice’s Nan falls and breaks her hip, Alice suggests a healing trip to the cottage at the lake where she first discovered a talent for and love of photography the summer she was 17. Maybe in that magical place she can figure out what she wants with the help of Nan and Charlie, the subject of her first photograph all those years ago. When their youngest sister Ai, a music idol, is embroiled in a scandal, sisters Rei and Kiki pause their own lives to spirit her away to their childhood home on the coast of Japan in Emily Itami’s Kakigori Summer. Worrying over Ai, they carefully avoid talking about the circumstances of their mother’s death 15 years prior until that silence can no longer be kept. Kakigori Summer is healing novel of family, sisterhood, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.
If you’re trying to squeeze in a last-minute Book Bingo square, all of these titles can work for several different squares, including: Great Escapes (all of them), Grief (The Summer that Changed Everything, Kakigori Summer), Intergenerational Friendship (One Golden Summer), Hope, Flower on the Cover (Hurricane Summer), Author from Another Continent (Kakigori Summer), and Suggested by a Library Worker (all of them).
~Posted by V.