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 look at love and the people and choices that mark us forever.

Six summers to fall in love. One moment to fall apart. A weekend to get it right.

This was my first Carley Fortune book, and it definitely won’t be my last.

I don’t reach for romance often, and when I do, I’m not typically looking for a cheesy rom-com with cardboard characters and a tidy meet-cute. I want a real romance, with people who feel like actual people and problems that feel like actual problems. A friend told me to check out Fortune’s work, so I picked this one to start with, partly because it’s about to become a series and I wanted to read it first. I was not disappointed.

Persephone, aka Percy, made a huge mistake about ten years ago, and she hasn’t let herself off the hook for it since. She’s built a careful, polished life in the city, the kind where she keeps everyone at arm’s length and nobody gets close enough to hurt her. Then she gets a phone call that pulls her straight back to the lake town where she spent the summers of her youth, and back into the path of Sam Florek, the guy she’d spent years trying not to think about. The book splits its time between two threads. In the past, we watch Percy and Sam meet as teenagers and spend six summers all but glued to each other, until their friendship turns into something much bigger and then comes crashing down. In the present, Percy is back in town for a funeral, face to face with Sam again, forced to deal with everything she ran away from.

I loved the format. The back and forth between past and present is handled so well. Watching their younger selves fall into each other while already knowing it ends in heartbreak gave the whole book this low ache that kept me invested. Every sweet moment in the past carries the weight of what you know is coming. Every tense moment in the present makes more sense once you’ve seen the history behind it.

The best part, and the thing I always care about most, is that these people felt real. Percy and Sam aren’t types. They’re not the brooding love interest and the quirky girl. They’re specific, full human beings with their own interests and fears and flaws. He’s the type who reads medical textbooks for fun. She writes horror stories. They have a whole shared world that feels lived-in. I got these characters. I understood why they did what they did, even the choices that hurt, because they acted the way real people act in these situations. Nobody made a dumb decision just to keep the plot moving.

That’s also why this didn’t fall into the trap that bounces me out of so many romances. There aren’t a bunch of overdone tropes here. There aren’t characters who exist just to stumble through predictable obstacles and expected roadblocks. The conflict comes from their history and their hurt and the things they couldn’t say to each other at the time. That’s the kind of conflict I can actually invest in.

The story is touching and relatable, and it stays grounded the whole time. It’s about first love, yes, but it’s also about the weight we carry from choices we made when we were young, and how long we’ll keep punishing ourselves for things we can’t change. Percy’s arc isn’t really about whether she ends up with Sam. It’s about whether she can forgive herself enough to let anyone in at all. That gave the romance real stakes underneath the swoon.

If you’re like me and you only dip into romance when it promises real characters and real feelings instead of formula, this is a great one to pick up. This won’t be my last Carley Fortune book. I’ve already started my collection.