I only read one book in June, but given that I did not read any in May, it was an improvement. I had been saving this book for summer, it is the very definition of a beach read. So even though I bought it in the winter and had been looking forward to it for months, I knew it had to wait for the beach.

Every Summer After by Carley Fortune. This book had been very much touted to me as it is set in the beach towns, the cottage country west of Ottawa. In Ontario, Muskoka is the famous cottage country. It is much closer to Toronto, and much ritzier. However, the Upper Ottawa Valley cottage country is much more rustic. It is quite literally mixed in among farms. It is also where my family lives. Barry’s Bay, where the book is set (although it is slightly mixed with the village of Wilno) I think is about an hour from where we moved to when we came back to Canada. And it does have epic Canada Day fireworks (they are actually talked about as the best in the county by all the locals), and there are not that many cottagers from Toronto who come all the way up there. This book follows a young teenage girl and her family, professors at University of Toronto, who buy a cottage in Barry’s Bay next to the permanent home of a young widow and her two sons. She and the younger son become best friends, spending every summer together from middle school until they are due to go to university. The go from friends to boyfriend and girlfriend, until she in a fit of loneliness and confusion does something so unforgiveable that she cannot forgive herself, leading her to run back to the city and never return. Until she’s 30, when she gets a call from the older brother, that their mom died. And so she returns to the summer town of her childhood and the boy who’s been haunting her since she was 18.

It’s your classic slow-burn, friends to lovers, reconnecting, small town romance. It’s largely predictable, but still really enjoyable.

And that’s it for the month of June. I almost included Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin because I finished it on the 1st of July, but you’ll have to wait for the July reads post for that one. I am hoping that I read a lot more in July as I will be on vacation. But I’m also not planning on packing that many books because my luggage is going to be heavy enough.

Laura