I genuinely don’t know how to put words together to make a solid review on this book. In all honesty, I wasn’t sold on the story in the first quarter of this book. Don’t get me wrong, I love Carley Fortune’s writing but I wasn’t loving the story as much as I did in “Every Summer After”. But somewhere soon after the first 75 pages, the switch flipped on and I couldn’t stop reading.
In “Every Summer After”, I felt the stickiness of childhood summers and the comforting weight of nostalgia. In “Meet Me At The Lake”, I felt like I was rubbed raw by the exploration of the mother/daughter relationship and the meaning of time and finding out who we are, what we want, and what makes us happy while dealing with the chaos that time deals us.
In this book, we follow a then and now storyline of Fern before and after her mother’s passing and her grappling with who she wants to be, what she wants in life, and if her story can or cannot include Will Baxter.
In the then timeline, we follow Fern wanting to set off on her own after graduating college and not follow her mother’s footsteps and take over her family’s vacation cabin/hotel business. In a chance encounter, she bumps into a young guy her age named Will Baxter who’s an aspiring artist. Will makes her question what she wants in life and realize that maybe, just maybe, she’s brave enough to deserve the future she dreams of.
In the now timeline, Fern is where she never thought she’d be, managing the hotel, only this time, her mom isn’t there to hassle her about. Her mother has passed in a horrible and sudden accident and she’s dealing with grief and is plagued with thoughts of what could have been if she really got to spend more time with her mom. And when she’s the least ready for it, Will Baxter comes back into her life and she doesn’t know how to handle this man who’s nothing like the young college kid she met ten years ago.
I really connected with the mother/daughter storyline. I think that many of us struggle with discovering who we are and what we want and then allowing ourselves to fight for what we want. Every year that we get older, the more aware we become of what exactly the world and our society expects from us and the more our dreams and desires get pushed to the side. It may be pessimistic of me to say this, but I truly do feel that the older we get and the further we travel away from our childhood years, we start to lose the braveness and courage we have to fight for our self-identity and authenticity.
I love how we get to see Fern struggle with discovering who she was under the pressure of satisfying her mother’s desires. The sense of guilt Fern feels as a daughter of a hard working mother is something I also relate to deeply. I know that Fern does find herself moving towards the way of life her mother dreamed for her, albeit unintentionally at first, but in the end, it was a decision she made on her own volition that best suited her life and dreams.
I know that this book is technically shelved under romance but it’s so much more than that. Personally, I wasn’t even hooked on this book for the romance but because of Fern. “Meet Me At The Lake” was such a great character study and I loved the past and present timeline that perfectly painted Fern’s journey as she grew into the woman she is at the end of the book. It was just so inspiring and relatable.
I was a bit weary of the present and past timeline at first because I was getting a bit tired of reading it so often. A lot of my recent reads, especially those in the romance genre, have featured a present and past timeline and I was worried that it may not be as interesting or gripping as it would have been if I read it at a later time. I was wrong. As mentioned before, I thought it was perfectly used for developing a well thought out character study of Fern but I also liked how it painted this picture of young love or love at first sight and what happens when the individuals of a couple grow up over the course of a decade.
The romance in this book was really interesting and felt pretty realistic. I’ve noticed recently that contemporary romance authors have started to change the way they right the male counterparts in a couple to be more flawed and vulnerable. Will and Fern were both each other’s foils in both timelines, admittedly, at different ends of the spectrum each time, but nonetheless were perfectly imperfect. It was refreshing to see how Will Baxter may have saved college aged Fern and steered her life in a direction she felt she wasn’t brave enough to but ten years later, it was Fern who needed to steer Will Baxter onto the right path. I’m not going to lie, it was frustrating to read about Will’s actions but in the long run, it made sense as to why he was the way he was and to was uncomfortably relatable.
I can’t finish this review without talking about Fern’s mother, Maggie. We know at the beginning of the book that Fern finds herself back at her mother’s resort after her mother unexpectedly passes away. But even knowing that she’s gone, I wanted more from Maggie. Carley Fortune didn’t just strike gold with her past and present timeline, she also spiced things up in this book by peppering Maggie’s diary entries throughout the book. We don’t only get to see Fern’s journey but also see Maggie’s. We get to see the “what if” moments in Maggie’s life and the things she fought for and the things she wasn’t brave enough to fight for. And we get to see Fern, decades later, remember the parts she knew of her mother and learn the parts she didn’t and that really broke me.
The last couple of her mother’s entries and the last chunk of the book had me sobbing. I was literally sobbing on my patio in the dark, finishing the book with the light from my phone because I couldn’t get up to turn on the overhead light. I was glued to the ending of the book and how everything wrapped up and how all the characters, both the side and main characters, were all connected in one way or another and how every single moment or decision in someone’s life is important but equally not as important as we may think because time is unpredictable and humbling. We don’t know what time will do with our decisions/moments and whether tomorrow they’ll come to fruition or crash and burn but to live a life of “what if’s” isn’t worth it. We need to fight for what we want, what we dream for, and make mistakes along the way so we can learn what works for us and what doesn’t until we can get one step closer to what we really want. The path may be a bumpy road or a wonky circle but time will take us where we’re meant to be and it’ll teach us to answer the questions we work hard to avoid: “what do I really want?” “who really am I?”.
I may have read way too hard into this book but personally, I really recommend this book. It’ll make you feel feelings and think about life and our younger selves and who we are now and where want to go and it also has a nice romance to go alongside it.