Category: summer

Summer reads take the imagine to a funny, thrilling, dramatic, mysterious, and relaxing destination, and that my friends is what the season is all about.

Photo by Link Hoang on Unsplash

Soak up the fun in the sun summer reads travel well to the beaches, lakes, pools, rest and relaxation escapes tailor-made for a beach bag packed with summer reads.

Photo by Niklas Ohlrogge on Unsplash

Big kids of a certain age remember the summer reading programs that emphasized reading is fundamental.

Reading is fundamental to recharge the imagination, soul, and natural curiosity.

Summer reads go hand in hand with a fun in the sun or shade read and recharge session.

Pack up a chic beach-pool-patio bag with summer essentials including a good read or two from this summer reads list.

The Pink Hotel: A Novel Hardcover by Liska Jaco

New job negotiations often comes with perks as newlywed Keith Collins finds out.  He and his new bride, Kat, jump at the invite from the general manager of the iconic, opulent Pink Hotel to come for a luxurious stay as a bid to hire Keith.  Kit is perfectly content with small-town life, however, Keith’s quest for bright lights, big city life is enhanced by the glamourous  lily-scented lobby that makes him feel right at home.

Soon after the Collinses arrival sweeping wildfires, rolling blackouts, and brutal riots break out across the city. The Pink Hotel closes its doors to “outsiders,” confining guests, including Kat and Keith to the property where a disgruntled staff coupled with eccentric, ultra-wealthy, and dangerously idle guests brews many an issue.

The Pink Hotel exposes a tenuous class system, corrosive behaviors, greed, disaster, resentments, provocative attitudes, class jealously all while the city burns and true love is called into question.

Hurricane Girl – by Marcy Dermansky

Allison Brody is thirty-two year old ready to mix, mingle and make a new home on the East Coast after just managing to flee her movie producer boyfriend.

Money saved up from years of writing and waitressing, Allison buys a small house on the beach. As bad luck would have it, a Category 3 hurricane makes landfall, completely destroying her home and leaving her without digs at the present.

Gripping and provocative, Hurricane Girl walks a knife’s edge between comedy and horror, love and sex, violence and freedom all while celebrating the true joy found in a summer swim and a tasty turkey sandwich.

The Retreat – by Sarah Pearse

All may not be as stunning on this wellness retreat off the English coast getaway as first thought. Reaper’s Rock has a dark past and a present abounding with rumors of the island being cursed.

After a young woman is found dead below the yoga pavilion in what seems to be a tragic fall, Detective Elin Warner learns the victim wasn’t a guest–she wasn’t meant to be on the island at all.

Time uncovers more secrets, and when someone else drowns in a diving incident, Elin suspects murder. Whodunit and why target guests at this luxury resort is the questions Elin must find the answer to before the island’s history repeats itself.

French Braid – by Anne Tyler

The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever venture beyond Baltimore, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy Garrett has trouble resisting her aspirations to be a painter. In 1959, less time keeping house for her husband, Robin, and pursuing a talent/career is the exception rather than the rule.  This alone has her asking do I dare?

Two teenage daughters, Alice and Lily, could not be more opposite of each other, and their younger brother David is intent on escaping his family’s orbit.

As the lives of each Garrett family member advances across decades, influences cast ripples of heartbreak, warmth, and hilarity through each generation.

With tremendous warmth and humor, French Braid illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from the bond of family love, and how close a family is to itself.

The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han

Belly believes everything good and magical happens between the months of June and August. Winter is simply the time where one count the weeks until the next summer, a place away from the beach house, away from Susannah, and most importantly, away from Jeremiah and Conrad.

Belly has known Jeremiah and Conrad since her very first summer—they have been her brother figures, her crushes, and everything in between. But one summer, one wonderful and terrible summer, the more everything changes, the more it all ends up just the way it should have been all along.

Coming June 17

Every Summer After – by Carley Fortune

Magazine writer Persephone Fraser has to make a choice when she returns to the lake she grew up on, and to the man she thought she’d never have to live without, in this achingly nostalgic debut.  Feeling the force of the saying you can never go home again, Persephone suspects it all too true since she made the biggest mistake of her life. Instead of glittering summers on the lakeshore of her childhood, she spends her summers in a stylish apartment in the city, going out with friends, and keeping everyone a safe distance from her heart.

One day she gets a call that sends her racing back to Barry’s Bay and into the orbit of Sam Florek.  Inseparable over five summers, Percy and Sam had been inseparable.

Slowly their friendship turned into something more, before falling spectacularly apart. When Percy returns to the lake to attend Sam’s mother’s funeral, the connection is a strong and undeniable as always.

Percy must confront the decisions she’s made over the years and time spent punishing herself for them, in order to determine, once and for all, whether their love might be bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past.

One Italian Summer: A Novel

When Katy’s mother dies, she is left reeling. Carol wasn’t just Katy’s mother, but her best friend.  She had all the answers and now, when Katy needs her the most, she is gone.  Their planned mother-daughter trip of a lifetime to Positano, the magical town where Carol spent the summer right before she met Katy’s father, is now in question.

Katy has been waiting years for Carol to take her, and now she is faced with embarking on the adventure alone.

Upon setting foot on the Amalfi Coast, Katy immediately feels her mother’s spirit. Stunning scenery, blue waters, breathtaking cliffsides, welcoming locals, and delectable food delight both eye and heart helping to bring Katy out of the depths of loss and back to life.

Much to Katy’s surprise and happiness, Carol appears in the flesh- healthy, sun-tanned, and thirty years old.

How can this be?

Katy doesn’t understand how or what is happening, all she can focus on is somehow she has gotten her mother back.  Over the course of One Italian Summer Katy gets to know Carol, not as her mother, but as the young woman before her.

Carol is not exactly who Katy imagined she might be leaving Katy to reconcile the mother who knew everything with the young woman who does not yet have a clue.

Early buzz about these summer reads has me ready to dive into the pages.

Summer is a prime time for curling up with a great book hot off a good summer reading list.

Reading evokes thought, enlightens the mind, enriches the soul, lifts the heart and takes one to treasured places and descriptive destinations in ways only the reader knows reading can.

Great for fun in the summer sun, porch sitting, or a cool peaceful spot in the shade, keeping company with a delightful-romantic-funny-mysterious selection from a good for summer reading list fills a few moments with imagination and inspiration while taking the reader on a literary summer vacation.

Such a Quiet Place – by Megan Miranda

Suspense on a summer day will come your way with Such a Quiet Place, a tale of murder in Hollow’s Edge, a traditionally quiet and private neighborhood that is until the murder of Brandon and Fiona Truett.

Neighborhood resident Ruby Fletcher is convicted of the murder, and the fallout causes a ripple effect throughout the entire neighborhood.

With an overturned conviction, Ruby is back in Hollow’s Edge and the home she once shared with Harper Nash.  Now terrified by her former housemate, Harper is torn between fear and a sense of responsibility towards Ruby’s living situation.

Lies begin to surface in Hollow’s Edge about the night of the Truett’s murders.  Harper begins receiving threatening notes which leads her to know she must do everything she can to find the truth before the killer strikes again.

Shocking twists and turns keep the reader in suspense, and reading way past your bedtime.

It Happened One Summer – by Tessa Bailey

Piper Bellinger is a fashionable pseudo wild child with a loyal pack of  paparazzi constantly on her heels.  Too much champagne mixed with one wild and crazy Beverly Hills rooftop party lands Piper in jail much to her “what did I do?” angst and her stepfather’s chagrin.  Cut off from family and funds, Piper and her sister are sent to Westport, Washington to run their late father’s dive bar.

Enter sea captain Brendan, a tall drink of seawater who thinks she won’t last a week outside of Beverly Hills.  Determination drives her to strive to prove to her stepfather and the surly, sexy local she can, and will, make it.  In doing so, Piper reconnects with her past, begins to feel right at home in Westport, and crosses paths with Brendan in an opposites attract manner that captures her attention and her heart.

Tessa Bailey’s Schitt’s Creek-inspired rom-com brilliance combines romance and comedy with small beach-town coziness and tantalizing banter that immediately hooks and enchants the reader.

Goldenrod – by Maggie Smith

Powerful poems that celebrate both the beauty and messiness of life, Goldenrod pulls objects from everyday life-a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road to reveal the magic of the moment, the contours of daily life, and the beauty found in it all.

Honeysuckle Summer – (Sweet Magnolias Novel) by Sherryl Woods

Courage is a beautiful thing, as Raylene Hammond finds out finding the courage to leave her abusive husband.  Despite being taken in by the Sweet Magnolias for safety and healing, trauma leaves her unable to leave the house.  When a terrible accident nearly occurs, due in part to her condition, Raylene realizes the time has come to seek help.

Support and encouragement from friends give Raylene the courage to set out on a journey to recovery.

Along the way, she meets an understanding  sheriff’s deputy, Carter Rollins, who becomes a supporter of her efforts. He’s even taken to bringing the outside world to her when she doesn’t feel ready to confront it.

A relationship between Raylene and Carter soon begins to bloom, and she must decide if she’s ready to move forward on this part of the journey or if it’s strictly a sweet summer romance.

Fox and I – by Catherine Raven

Catherine Raven receives her PhD in biology, and soon moves into an isolated cottage in Montana where she teaches remotely as well as leading field classes in Yellowstone National Park.

The only regular visitor Catherine has is a fox with whom she develops a friendship.

Pet owners get it, and can attest to the lessons in personal growth, coming to the realization we are never alone when we are connected to the natural world, and how loss can be transformed into meaning through nature, our surroundings, and relationships with animals.

Count the Ways – by Joyce Maynard

New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard pens a mesmerizing story of Eleanor and Cam from first meeting at a crafts fair in Vermont in the early 1970s to the joy of parenting three children, bitterness of tragedy, fallout from  infidelity, to truths through redemption.

Lessons in love, holding on and letting go of it fill the pages of Count the Ways is a beautiful, poignant, and deeply compassionate story of home, parenthood, love, and forgiveness.

Escape the routine of a summer day or evening by taking a break for one  with a great book selection from a good summer reading list.