For me, this was one of those books that make me want to add a couple more stars to my rating because honestly, I think 5 stars is not enough.

At this point, Melissa Brayden is one of my favorite authors, so when a new book of hers comes out I have to read it. I've loved all of her novels so far, but this one is my new favorite.

Melissa Brayden is at the top of my favourite lesbian books authors (see full list here: https://lezreviewbooks.wordpress.com/my-top-tens/). Her books have romance, angst, hot scenes, wit and funny dialogues. All these elements balanced in well conceived plot and subplots. The reader can safely expect a very enjoyable reading experience.

Having said this, I might have set the bar too high and now I expect to be wowed by every single book like I was with, for example, Kiss the girl. It wasn't the case with Strawberry summer, hence, my 4 star rating. Don't get me wrong, all the elements of Ms. Brayden's style are present, the main characters chemistry, the hot scenes, the banter, the witty dialogues, the lovable secondary characters but just maybe not in Ms. Brayden's usual eloquence.

The book is divided roughly in two parts, it starts with Courtney and Maggie meeting as teenagers and follow their romance through college years up to their breakup. The second part takes us to the present time, the characters in their mid twenties, when Courtney comes back to Maggie's hometown. If they'd get their happily ever after is for the reader to discover. Here is my issue with the plot: it seems divided into two distinctive and separated parts and doesn't seem to flow seamlessly. Present and past aren't integrated as a whole. The reader gets a brief introduction of the present in a short preface and then is taken to the past for 65% of the book. In my opinion, the past section dragged for too long to maintain the conflict tension and resolution. However, don't let my comments put you off, despite my criticism, I found this book a very enjoyable read anyway.

ARC provided by the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

"On the drive back to my house, I blared the radio and smiled at this new development in my once boring and uneventful life. Courtney Carrington had come to town."

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5 / 5

Perfect. This novel had absolutely everything I wanted and then some on top of that. It made me cry at least twice. Strawberry Summer was my first venture into Melissa Brayden's work and now I'm off to go get my hands on some more (I'm thinking First Position). This book has some well-loved tropes, two sparkling female leads and a host of loveable background characters, and more than its fair share of emotional moments. Strawberry Summer is a heartwarming and heartbreaking lesbian novel that is bound to be an absolute hit.

Margaret "Maggie" Beringer is dawdling through life. She lives on a strawberry farm with her beloved older brother Clay, her father, and her erotica-writing mother, who form a loving family unit. But Maggie's only real friend is her cousin Berta, until Courtney Carrington, heiress to a department store chain and life rife with family misfortune, sashays into her life (or, more accurately, into Maggie's history presentation on Abraham Lincoln). And nothing was ever the same again.

"I liked living dangerously. Well, in small, controllable scenarios quite close to my own backyard"

Margaret is a wanderer. She loves the family farm and the town of Tanners Peak, but she isn't sure what she wants from life. There's a responsibility to the farm, but is that what she wants to do forever? She knows what is safe, where her comfort zone is and Maggie does not want to leave, not until someone makes her. Margaret is family and community driven but is unfortunately lacking in friends at the beginning. As she grows older she blossoms into a lovely young, confident woman with an array of intelligent, loveable friends - Berta, Melanie, Travis. Of the two girls, Margaret was my favourite.

"Courtney, I was finding, was the type of girl who leapt at life and went after what she wanted"

Courtney is a city girl. She's driven, passionate, and knows what she wants - to take over the family department business - and she's known it since she was a child. She also has lots of business attire that Maggie finds very attractive. Courtney loves and when she loves, she loves passionately, but because of this she's always looking for signs of commitment. What happens, then, when it looks like the life of the person you love isn't going to be compatible with yours?

"The smile was gone and so was the girl I loved. I was drowning and I didn't know how to get air."

Importantly, Strawberry Summer is not a book about being gay. Yes, it is a lesbian romance, but it isn't about coming out, dealing with bullying, or learning to accept that you aren't straight. If you are looking for that kind of book, you aren't going to find it here. Maggie is confident in her sexuality and her family approves of her relationship; Courtney is bisexual and proud of it, and I'm fairly sure there's never a negative comment made about their relationship. Which makes a lovely change from a lot of books I've read - most of the books is excellent chemistry and warm, fuzzy feelings. Strawberry Summer is pure romance with a healthy dash of investigation into growing up and learning what you want from life and yourself.

"My heart is telling me to go with her to Chicago, to fight for her once and for all, the way I should have done all those years ago. But it's life my feet are stuck in this town."

It also spans a rather large timeframe - ten years, I think. We open with the scene described in the blurb - Maggie meets Courtney again and she definitely is not pleased. This interaction plays on your mind as we jump backwards in time to when the two young women met and fell in love. From there on out, the time flow is linear with tragedy and heartbreak ever looming in the distance. I actually really enjoyed this, watching the progression of Maggie and Courtney as the grow up and get older. The problems you face at sixteen are different to those at twenty, and Brayden managed to encompass this very well.

Strawberry Summer doesn't pull any punches. The chemistry is very well developed and feels real, the trials the cast are put through are realistic and the scenes are poignant, but most of all the ending is emotionally satisfying. If you want a sophisticated, beautiful, and long-spanning romance, I highly recommend this!

Melissa Brayden is to me one of the very best writers in the lesbian romance genre. She has set a very high standard, you know like Mount Everest high. Each and every book a met or surpassed the quality and awesomeness of the previous book. That’s unbelievably difficult to achieve, to time and time again bring just the best of the very best. There is a but! With that being said Strawberry Summer is not my favorite of hers. Don’t get me wrong it’s good, totes is, it’s just not great.

Strawberry Summer spends a lot of the story in a flashback. When we meet the two main characters Courtney Carrington has just moved from Chicago to a small picturesque farming community just outside of Santa Barbara. The first day at her new high school, she meets and has her a-ha moment with Margaret Beringer. Margaret is kind of a loner, not unpopular, just keeps to her small group on the fray of popularity. She’s a strawberry farmer’s kid who spends her days hanging out with nature and reading Hemingway for fun. Courtney, a strikingly beautiful department store heiress is immediately smitten and doesn’t hold back her admiration. This is a story of first loves in a star-crossed lover kind of way. Time and distance keep pulling these two apart but they spend most of their late teens and early 20’s as a couple.

There inlays one big issue. You know as the reader a shoe is going to drop, you are waiting for it the whole time. This is a romance novel, they must break up to get back together, and they met as teens for God ’s sake. You know it’s going to happen! Right! So there many stories that have done this exact same format and have done it very well. Poppy Jenkins is probably the biggest standout. To me, this particular book spends too much, like 75+% of the book in flashback mode. You just keep waiting for the younger days to be over and get to the now. Well, at least I did.

The other issues. It’s not fun! I know I can’t believe I wrote that, but it wasn’t. There just isn’t that great dialogue between the mains that you expect from a Brayden book. Up until know, you had amazing witty banter and wordplay. You just don’t see it in this one, maybe because Margaret is a more serious character and humor isn’t her go to language. I was missing it, I wanted it back! I also wanted that amazing tension Brayden is the queen of ratcheting up. Again, not there! I didn’t feel that the transitions were as seamless as previous books either, I kept thinking, another summer and they are still together, where are we headed, why is this not moving along at a faster pace. So much of the book was in the past, I just kept wishing more of it would have been focused on the present.

There are good moments too. Moments that are so sweet you smile and moments so tragic your heart breaks. Overall it is a good book, it really is. There are going to be people that adore this one, promise. To me, this one was somewhat, formula wise, reminiscent of Waiting in the Wings, but without the tension and amazing interchange between characters. Even the supporting cast was cute but lackluster. This feels harsh, and I don’t mean it to be. It is a good book, I totally promise.

Strawberry Summer follows Margaret 'Maggie' Beringer, a small-town girl whose family own the local strawberry farm, and mysterious and devastatingly gorgeous department store heiress Courtney Carrington. After five years of no contact following their break up, they meet each other again when Courtney returns to town following her father's death. Following the timeline of their relationship, from the moment they met as teenagers, to the moment they meet again and beyond, the reader falls in love with them falling in love, and gets to experience the highs and lows they have together.

Holy moly, this book emotionally destroyed me in the best possible way. There was the perfect blend of passion, love, and angst, and I was completely enraptured from beginning to end. It's hauntingly beautiful, and the connection between them stays with you long after you've read it.

I really appreciated the flashbacks that we got (most of the book was recounting the previous seven+ years of their relationship) because it totally added to the emotional strength of their story and how much their reunion meant. I think without those flashbacks, and therefore this book solely being about their reconnection as both friends and a couple, it wouldn't have been nearly as good as it actually is.

I felt everything that they felt. I truly believed that Courtney and Maggie were the loves of each other's lives, and the fact that they got a happy ending made my heart swell.
This is one of those books I wish I could read for the first time over and over again because the genuineness of it absolutely struck me. Everyone in this book was real to me. No one seemed to be two-dimensional, and even the secondary characters had a warmth and depth to them that only a good writer could give them.
I welled up reading this, that's how much it affected me.

If I could give this more than five stars then I absolutely would. This is the F/F romance I've been waiting to read. It's crushingly gorgeous. It's heartwarming. It's absolutely everything you could ever hope for.

There are authors you wish them to have 100 books already published, so you can read them and only them in the following year or so. Melissa Brayden is that author for me. No matter of the plot, of the book, of the characters, whenever I read one of her books, there is that warm, fuzzy feeling it causes inside of me. Something just melts inside, and you can't do anything but live through and feel with and for those characters. Strawberry summer is no exception. Both Margaret and Courtney are so well written, so wise for their age, so convincing as character, both in their teen years as well as in their twenties. Melissa Brayden, when she writes happy, love scenes, is able to create warmth and loveliness, and, if she writes about unfortunate moments, you feel the deepest sadness and grief for the characters.