A Romance Debut Kissed by Sunshine and Lazy Lake Days











Contemporary Women's Fiction, Contemporary Women's Romance, Coming of Age Romance
Berkley
May 10, 2022
ebook, audiobook, paperback
320

"A radiant debut."—Emily Henry,#1 New York Times bestselling author of Book Lovers
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
Named One of the Hottest Reads of Summer 2022 by Today ∙ Parade ∙ PopSugar ∙ USA Today ∙ SheReads ∙ BuzzFeed ∙ BookBub ∙ Bustle ∙and more!
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.
“I would lose nights imagining where Sam was at that precise moment, wondering if there’s a chance he might be thinking of me. Sometimes I felt sure he was—like there was an invisible, unbreakable string that ran between us, stretching vast distances and keeping us joined.”
Full of frazzled hope, the anguish of simmering of all the what if’s that were left in the past, and the resolute knowledge of finding a soulmate as a teenager, Every Summer After by Carley Fortune is the story that should be on everyone’s summer reading list.
Percy (short for Persephone) meets Sam and his older brother Charlie the very first summer her parents occupy their new acquired lake home just four hours outside of Toronto. Sam and Percy are the same age, full of teen hormones, awkward questions, and both relentlessly teased by Charlie. Through a mutual admiration of each other’s interests like friendship bracelets, horror movies, anatomy textbooks, and spending every moment possible in the lake— Sam and Percy forge a fast, fierce friendship.
He grinned. “I pay attention to a lot of things about you, Percy Fraser.”
With each passing summer their friendship grows—even if their interests change. Percy is always unabashedly herself, and Sam provides steady support even when her confidence quakes. Whereas Sam is stoically resolute in his determination to become a doctor, leave his sleepy small town of Barry’s Bay and make a name for himself. The loss of his father from a heart complication, to seeing his widowed mother take care of her sons makes a mark on Sam that weighs heavy. Charlie seems to take nothing seriously, which irritates his brother. Inevitably, their summer friendship blooms into something more between Sam and Percy, but it isn’t until the summer before college where things go sideways…but this is a second chance romance after all.
Every Summer After is a story of all the unspoken feelings that come with teenage loves, falling for your best friend, and the choices that all domino into an inevitable mess. Percy and Sam are forced together again after over ten years apart. With the death of Sam’s mother, Percy is forced to confront the man whom no one will ever measure up against, and all those feelings she still hasn’t been able to release.
“Sometimes I think no one gets me the way you do,” he said, the pink of his cheeks deepening to scarlet. “Do you ever get that feeling?”
I couldn’t put this beautiful story down. Carley Fortune has such a wonderful way of injecting every ounce of feeling into her prose that it makes you feel each emotion as both Percy and Sam experience them. I was transported to the lake with these characters, and I was also swept away by how engrossed I became with their story. I didn’t plan on reviewing because I just wanted to savor this thoughtful story, but in the end, I knew I needed to share my thoughts so that you all could experience this as well.
This is not a book to miss! Every Summer After is a beautifully written second chance romance that is equal parts coming of age story, and equal parts ode to summer love. Carley Fortune has earned every single star! Go grab yourself a copy! You will not regret it!

Jes is a self-proclaimed bookworm, who recently moved from the PNW back to the Midwest. When her nose isn’t in a book, she’s spending time with her husband, two kids, and her three fur babies, or exploring the globe. She also firmly believes that you should start the day with coffee, and end the day in bed with a good book.