I picked up Every Summer After on a Thursday night when I should have been sleeping. I had work the next morning. But I read until my phone screen dimmed at 2 AM, and when I finished, I just sat there in the dark, feeling like I’d been holding my breath for three hundred pages.
The question at the heart of this book: can you ever really go back to the person you were before you broke everything?
Percy and Sam and the Summers That Defined Them
Persephone Fraser, known as Percy, meets Sam Florek when she’s thirteen. Her family buys a lake cottage next to his year-round home in Barry’s Bay, a small Canadian town that smells like pine needles and lake water. They become best friends through the slow, golden rituals of summer: swimming until their fingers prune, working at his mother’s restaurant, reading horror stories she writes on napkins.
Percy is sharp and funny, the kind of girl who holds people at arm’s length with her wit. Sam is quieter, more serious, the kind of boy who studies medical textbooks while she reads him her latest draft. Their friendship feels inevitable, like the tide coming in.
The story moves between two timelines: the past, where we watch them fall from friends into something more, and the present, where Percy returns to Barry’s Bay for Sam’s mother’s funeral after twelve years of silence. Carley Fortune keeps the mystery of what tore them apart hovering just out of reach. You know something terrible happened. You just don’t know what. And that tension made it impossible for me to stop reading.
Honestly, I’ve read a lot of second-chance romances. This one felt different. Not because the plot is revolutionary, but because the ache in it felt real.
The Mistake That Haunts Every Page
The core theme here is self-punishment. Percy did something bad, and she’s been punishing herself for a decade. She stays away from Barry’s Bay. She dates men who don’t matter. She builds a life that looks fine from the outside but feels hollow on the inside.
Fortune uses the lake as her key imagery. Water as memory. Water as return. Every time Percy steps into the lake in the present timeline, she’s also stepping back into her past. The water doesn’t change. She does.
There’s a moment where Percy remembers Sam tugging on her friendship bracelet and saying “I swear.” It’s a small gesture, a childhood promise. But Fortune returns to it again and again, and by the end, that single image carries the weight of everything they lost.
What struck me was how Percy’s mistake isn’t just about betrayal. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. She convinced herself she was the kind of person who ruins things. And that belief became a cage.
I thought about a mistake I made in my early twenties. Nothing dramatic. But I carried it around for years like a stone in my pocket. I think that’s why this book got under my skin. It understands that the strongest cage isn’t made of iron. It’s made of shame.
What This Book Does and Doesn’t Do for You
This book won’t fix your life. It won’t teach you anything you haven’t heard before about forgiveness or second chances. But it will make you feel slightly less alone in the moments when you’re convinced your past mistakes have made you unworthy of love.
The writing is straightforward, almost plain at times. Fortune doesn’t try to be poetic. She lets the story do the work. And for the most part, it works. The pacing drags a little in the middle, and I wish we’d gotten more of Sam’s perspective. He remains a bit of a mystery, even at the end.
I’ll be honest: the miscommunication trope is strong here. If that frustrates you, this might test your patience. Percy could have just told Sam the truth at any point. But then again, isn’t that the point? Sometimes we don’t speak because we’re afraid that saying it out loud makes it real.
Who should read this: anyone who’s ever looked at an old photograph and felt a physical ache. Anyone who’s ever wondered what would happen if they went back to the place where they broke their own heart.
Who shouldn’t: if you need your characters to make rational decisions, skip this. If you’re not in the mood to cry on public transportation, wait for a weekend.
I finished Every Summer After at 2 AM, and I didn’t go to sleep right away. I sat there thinking about the summers I spent at my grandmother’s house, the way the air smelled different there, the people I’ve lost contact with, the promises I made as a kid that I never kept.
This book won’t change your life. But it might make you want to call someone you haven’t spoken to in a long time. And honestly, that’s enough.
