The summer of 2022 brought a whole stack of new releases that were amazing and new inventive plots and genre bending stories. I don’t tend to keep up with new releases but this summer, I really did and managed to read quite a few of them.
I thought that before we welcome in October and all the Autumn festivities, I’d recap on the summer of 2022 and share some mini-reviews.
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.
Wow. This book. First of all, this book does mention cheating. I know some people hate things like that and honestly, I’m not a big fan of it but I somehow still managed to fall in love with this book anyway. “Every Summer After” is summer in a book. I don’t know how to describe it but when I think back at my childhood growing up, I think of the Summers when I wasn’t in school and all the fond memories I made in those long and joyous weeks. I didn’t grow up vacationing at a cabin by the lake like the main character in this book did but the author did such a great job creating Persephone to be someone we can all relate to. I remember the sticky summers, meeting new people, and building this whole life outside of school that I couldn’t wait to return to every time my vacation ended and I was back in school. The author writes summers so tangibly in this book that I could feel it. It got me feeling all warm and nostalgic inside just like Stranger Things Season 3 did. This book is about our main character, Persephone, as she meets a boy at the lake her family vacations at every summer. We watch these two gangly and awkward tweens grow up into teenagers and then full grown adults in their thirties as they navigate their lives together in the summers they’ve grown to love. It’s messy, it’s cute, it’s relatable, and the writing is just gorgeous. This is a book that I’m going to reread every summer without a fail and I know that Carley Fortune’s now an auto buy author for me.
I’ve mentioned this in some post recently but I feel like Christina Lauren’s recent books have been more plot focused than romance focused. They’re exploring these crazy cool ideas and set up highly entertaining plots and are delivering mild, not that steamy romances. I don’t mean for that to come off in a mean way but I just haven’t connected with their recent romances. I feel like it’s missing that tension that I love in romance books. I think “The Soulmate Equation” was the most recent new Christina Lauren romance that had that steamy yet gripping romance that I loved reading in their earlier works like “My Favorite Half-Night Stand” and “Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating”. This book once again delivered an entertaining plot and it felt like watching a highly entertaining action comedy movie. I think that this may be a weirdly specific description but if this book was a movie, I feel like it would be a movie with Seth Rogan, Mark Wahlberg, and some other comedian actor that would come out in June or July when the summer’s really kicking off. While I didn’t love the romance as much as the romances in their earlier books, it wasn’t that bad and I actually liked it. It felt very refreshing as it was a second chance romance and I don’t read many of those. I can’t put my finger on it but there was something missing from the romance that would have made me love it more but all in all, this was a fun, quick summer read.
This book was a doozy. I’m not going to lie, it was pretty intimidating and I’m quite surprised that I read this book as fast as I did. This book is just as gorgeous inside as it is outside. This book follows two friends as they grow up and develop video games together all while facing the beauty and horrors brought upon by yet another tomorrow. It’s stock full of trigger warnings so please do your research before going into it. This is a book that I know I’m going to have to revisit. After reading it, I felt equally empty as I felt fulfilled. I don’t know how the author did it but she broke me and at the same time, gave me a spark for living and appreciating life. This book was four hundred plus pages of a cast of characters dealing with unending blows of life and how they cope with what’s thrown at them. I know I keep repeating myself about how this book makes you think about life but it truly does and I don’t know how to describe its affect on me in any other way. I wanted to write a full length review for this book but I genuinely couldn’t and quickly realized that it’s a task for when I reread it. I’m not a big video game person, in fact I own a total amount of zero games. If you ask me what a switch looks like, I probably can’t point to one. But I do love stories and creativity and the game development part of this book was full of these two things. I also really related to the female main character as I’m also a software gal in a male driven field. I loved seeing how these characters came up with the story boards for these games and how each game meant something different to them. I loved how the author divided the book by the games that they had created because the stories of the games they made and the way they interpreted them really indicated where the two characters were in life. The structure of this book being divided by the games kind of mimicked the levels of a video game except the video game is life and the levels are surviving something else that’s trying to bring you down or take you out. In conclusion, it’s a work of art and I highly recommend it if you’re fine with the trigger warnings.
This reignited my love of romance and this is the book that really sold me on Emily Henry. I can’t remember if I read this first or “Every Summer After” but it’s one of the books that kick started a great summer of reading. This book had great fun playing with the idea of romance and the idea of a small town romances. This book featured two, very real world, work driven, ambitious characters placed in what they think is a sugary sweet environment they can’t wait to escape. They’re forced to deal with each other, the towns people, and the problems they’ve left behind in the city. Our main character is dealing with repairing her relationship with her younger sister and with her love for the city she’s grown up in all while dealing with the grief of growing up quickly without her mother. As an elder sibling, I really could relate to Nora. The way she cared for her sister and was willing to sacrifice her happiness for her sister’s happiness is uncomfortably relatable. This is one of the more spicier of Emily Henry’s romances which I personally enjoyed. That lake scene? One of the best five pages I read all this summer. Also, how can I not mention Charlie. Charlie is just… everything every significant other should be like. I also really loved the ending. It’s hard to speak on it without spoiling it but it was one of the more realistic romance endings I’ve read in a while. Also, side note, I just realized the main character of this romance book that plays on rom com tropes is named Nora, like Nora Ephron the Queen of romcoms.
Feel free to read my full review here.
This book honestly blew up on the internet and I was so excited to pick it up. It’s definitely the romance book of the summer with the most interesting premise. A ghostwriter falls in love with a ghost? Count me in. Unfortunately, this book fell a bit flat for me. While I did enjoy the first half of this book, it kind of fell flat for me in the second half. I just didn’t mesh with the writing style and it felt a little like telling rather than showing. I think the strongest parts of the book and the parts that I loved the most were those when we got to hear about the main character’s relationship with her father. This book gave off old school ABC family/Disney movie vibes that you can find in movies like Hocus Pocus or Casper. The idea of a family that runs a morgue and has special paranormal gifts is such a cozy vibe.
Feel free to read my full review here.
This was a feel good book. I liked the first half and thought it was okay but the second half, my oh my, it got me. It’s a book that I’m going to definitely have to revisit. This book follows our main character, who in her later stages of life (thirties or forties I forgot lol), somehow time travels back to when she’s a high schooler. This book is all about life and diving into how much our past actions affect our futures that have yet to come. If given the chance to go back in time, would you change things or let things be? My favorite part of this book was the father daughter relationship and it’s why I loved the second half of this book so much. The second half of the book really dived into the father daughter relationship and offered such a cool view point of revisiting your childhood as an adult and meeting your parent with the mentality and life experience of someone who is now much older and around the same age as the parent. Seeing your parents as your peers rather than someone who’s older and to be respected is eye opening and I love how the author played with this concept to deepen the relationship between the father and the daughter. It definitely had me crying.
What was your favorite Summer 2022 new release?
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