Same Time Next Summer, Annabel Monaghan

This one hooked me! It fits the chick-lit, beach read genre very well, and the ending is obvious from the beginning, but that’s the genre–I’d have been mad if Sam and Wyatt hadn’t ended up together in the end. It’s the how it happens that makes it interesting.

The characters and the scenarios were surprisingly complex and nuanced, which is necessary I think when the entire story is about their romance–what drove them apart, and what brings them back together again in the end. Sam and Wyatt practically grew up together, as neighbors on the beach of Long Island every summer. The story bounces between now and flashbacks to the past, so we learn their back story little by little, even as Sam grapples with the fact that she’s in Long Island with her fiancee Jack, considering getting married on the Island. But Wyatt is there, for the first time in seventeen years. She hasn’t seen him since he broke her heart as a teenager. Considering how crazy they were about each other, I was wondering how the author was going to motivate their breakup without it seeming contrived, but she chooses a terrific angle.

If my husband read this book, I know he’d dislike Sam, and think her fickle (I suspect most men would think so, but this isn’t their genre). I think her actions are very well motivated, and paced to match her self-revelations. Wyatt, meanwhile, isn’t your stereotypical romantic hero, but also believably written. I was really rooting for them, and I love how it ended.

My ratiing: ****1/2

Language: a smattering. Not overwhelming.

Violence: none

Sexual content: it’s there, but in a fade-to-black kind of a way

Political content: present, and annoying. I hate how books from big publishers always feel the need to “check the boxes” 

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