A very late read, as from experience, Lauren Bailey's books are quite long and I wanted to be able to continuously read it to finish it so I kept putting it back until I could sit down with it properly.

I am glad I finally got to it. Recently there seems to be a trend of romance novels with meeting the love of your life at the wrong timing and you somehow just keep missing each other in life. This is one of them but I love the way they somehow just cross paths every 5 years and somehow seem to have a chance to be together but some twist happens and it never happens for them.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC (read late unfortunately) and I get to find out what happens to them. I love the ending!

Olivia Taylor returns to her family estate in the Hamptons to help her father and sisters pack up and sell their beachfront home, a bittersweet farewell to her childhood and the memories of her late mother. As she navigates the upheaval of her impending divorce, she crosses paths with Fred, her long-lost love, reopening old wounds and unresolved feelings. While grappling with her family's financial struggles and her own changing identity, Olivia faces the possibility of a fresh start with Fred, questioning whether their love can survive after so many failed attempts. This book was unfortunately very forgettable! I feel like I've already read a lot of romance books with the same or similar storyline so it all blended together.

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publishing Company for providing me this Digital Advanced Readers Copy of the book!

The beachy vibes of the cover definitely pulled me in when I requested a copy to read, and was so excited for the perfect beach read.

A coastal beach house, complex family dynamics, and a romance. However, it wasn’t the beach read I’d hoped for unfortunately, and had a hard time connecting to the story.

I did enjoy the narration of the audiobook format and would recommend!

*many thanks to Alcove Press, Netgalley for the gifted copy

It was really good to read, it was easy but I don’t feel tamhat connection That I thought I would have, anyway an excellent book that I think many readers will like, the review came out late because I lost my account password🥺

If you are a Colleen Hoover fan or Elin Hilderbrand fan, you'll love this book! It was cute and an easy read but I didn't feel any connection or beautiful detail. I was just good.

A woman returns to her family’s Hamptons beach house for one last time—and a final chance at lost love—in this contemporary Persuasion retelling, perfect for fans of Emily Henry and Rebecca Serle.

Olivia Taylor’s marriage is ending, and she heads back home to help pack up the family estate. Along with saying goodbye to her childhood home, she must face Fred, the love of her life, after five years apart. They’ve tried and failed before, but maybe this time, things will be different.

The alternating timelines, with five-year jumps, kept me both in awe of and frustrated with the characters! I wasn’t sure if I’d be team Fred, but the story hooked me until the end. It was a unique read, and I loved that Olivia was a pro tennis player. 🎾

Summer After Summer by Lauren Bailey is a modern retelling of Jane Austen's Persuasion, set against the backdrop of the Hamptons. The story follows Olivia Taylor as she returns to her family's beachfront estate to help pack up their home, which has been sold after years of financial struggle. Complicating matters is the unexpected buyer—her first love, Fred, with whom she shares a tumultuous history.

While the book has a lot of elements I enjoy in a summer read—like the charming coastal setting, the possibility of a second chance romance, and a likable male lead—it ultimately fell short in a few key areas. The love story between Olivia and Fred was frustrating, with their separation feeling more like a result of poor communication rather than any substantial obstacle. Additionally, the portrayal of Olivia's wealthy but inactive family felt out of place in a modern context, making them less sympathetic and relatable.

Olivia herself came across as immature and at times, petty—traits I found surprising and disappointing for a 36-year-old protagonist. The constant back-and-forth in the timeline added to my confusion, and the story often felt more like a young adult novel than the adult romance I was expecting.

In the end, Summer After Summer has all the ingredients for a compelling summer romance—second chances, family drama, and nostalgic summer love—but it didn't quite come together for me. It was an okay read, but it lacked the spark to make it truly memorable.

Not my cup of tea but I recommended this title to my friends who are fans of Colleen Hoover and Elon Hilderbrand.

When Olivia’s marriage falls apart, she runs to her family’s Hamptons beach house to help pack it up for sale after her father mishandles the family finances. She learns that the person who bought the house is her on-and-off-again love, Fred. The story flashes between past and present as we witness Olivia and Fred’s relationship drama summer after summer.

This was a quick and easy beach read, but the characters were hard to like. Olivia was fine, but I found Fred insufferable and he had few redeeming qualities. Their relationship was toxic, so I had a hard time rooting for them. I learned after reading that it is actually a retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which I love, and I wish I had known that ahead of time because I might have liked it more knowing that. If you like Gossip Girl, Magnolia Parks, or are just fascinated by rich people problems, this could be a fun book for you. I gave it 3 out of 5 stars. It was an easy and enjoyable read but I just couldn’t connect with their relationship.

Just my type of book, A brilliant holiday read. Olivia and Fred, will the timing ever be right, will she return to new York away from her family. I was able to lose myself in this book, with a twist I didn’t see coming. Worth a read, looking forward to explore more books by Lauren Bailey

I'm not much into classics, but I am very interested in the retellings. So, I haven't read Persuasion but I've read a modern retelling by an Indian writer (set in India), which I liked. That was the reason I requested this book, but I couldn't finish this one, as I didn't connect with the characters and writing style. Maybe, this book wasn't for me.

Thank you for the ARC.

// thank you to the publishers and net galley for granting me an arc of this book!

i’m very sad that i did not enjoy this book as much as i wanted to. i think i went into it wanting the wrong things: i’m a massive fan of jane austen’s persuasion and so i was really excited to see a modern retelling of one of her lesser-known works, especially one advertised as ‘perfect for fans of beach read by emily henry’. while i loved the summer house setting and multiple timelines, i think this book felt a bit confused. it felt like the retelling didn’t entirely understand what made the original so great.

we’re not given a lot to root for with regards to fred specifically and the main couple more generally. in the original, the beautiful thing about the romance is that both characters see each other so clearly. they are the first people in their lives that put the other first–and not just put them first, but understand and see one another so clearly where no one else in their lives does. here, i think we’re missing that *reason* to root for the main couple despite all their years apart. especially when, when describing the start of the relationship with the main character’s husband, i found myself rooting for him more than fred. this idea of her finally having a love where she felt safe, and learning that love didn’t have to be turbulent and uncertain to be *real*--i thought that was a really beautiful message and i was honestly rooting for them. their first summer together when they are 16 is sweet and described well, but you really have to trust in the main character when she tells you ‘it’s like this with no one else’ because it’s honestly not that clear from their actions. you can really tell that the main character has some attachment issues in terms of not wanting to commit to something serious through hardships–and this is by no means a criticism of the book, it felt very realistic for the main character to be going through these things considering everything that had happened to her. but it makes it much more difficult to root for the main couple, especially in contrast to her husband, where you don’t see her pull herself back constantly (probably because she’s not actually interested in him beyond the safety net, but that’s neither here nor there).

furthermore, i think that the fact that both characters emotionally cheated on their partners for one another made it much harder to root for them. especially when we see the main character suffering from the effects of her husband cheating at the very start of the book. again, i do think this criticism partially comes from reading this reading this primarily as a jane austen retelling–because in that book, what’s so nice is this idea they both held a torch for one another and never got close to marriage because they both unconsciously compared every person that came after to one another. whereas in this book, it feels more like an strange obsession that the main character can’t quite get rid of. within hours of landing in london, she seeks fred out despite how badly he hurt her, simply because she ‘can’t stop herself’ and ‘has to see him’. it just felt a little less sincere.

i also found this was a strange kind of retelling. some of the character names were retained (i.e. calling the love interest fred or his ‘fling’ lucy), but others were not (i.e. not calling the main character anne). some plot points were kept, but twisted slightly (i.e. selling their house, but being defrauded by her husband in the process). i found there were not a lot of positive additions to the story–basically only the idea that the oldest sister, who stays at home with her father, unmarried forever, in persuasion, is bisexual. i thought this was a really nice new layer to add to the original, and something i will carry with me when i reread persuasion as a ‘headcanon’. fragments were also taken directly from the original text (i.e. fred’s letter saying he’s ‘half agony, half hope’), but these made little sense in this context. fred-from-new-england would never say that, he wouldn’t use those words. he also wouldn’t send a letter when they’ve always reached out to one another via text.

another thing i found quite strange, which is more of a personal pet peeve, is the hyperrealism in this romance. while i understand that a story that spans across the last 20 years will contain things like the financial crisis of 2008 and the covid pandemic of 2020, seeing events like these in romance novels always puts me off. personally, the primary purpose of romance is escapism, escaping into a world close enough to reality that it could be real, but still isn’t. so to include things like how the covid pandemic ended up inadvertently causing the main characters divorce really put me off. however, this is a personal preference of mine, and i’m sure other people prefer the hyperrealism.

i will say that i loved the main characters commitment to her ambitions, her tennis career was her everything, and that was nice to see. i loved the way she ended up choosing her own ambitions and plans over those of fred when he proposed to her at 21. which, when she said she wanted to not get married to her, he thought the best move was ending that relationship–and i think this underscores what i disliked about this book so much: none of these leaps in miscommunication felt realistic or logical. miscommunication, especially in love stories which span such a long timeline, is natural and human. but none of these instances felt realistic. or, if they did, they felt like things i wouldn’t be able to get past if i was in that situation (i.e. her not telling fred she had a fiance and him finding out when he popped by her hotel room before what was basically a date).

i also loved the thread throughout here about the main character discovering more about her mother, who passed away in when she was a teenager, through the house. finding her journal, her favorite books, and using that to understand her mother’s life–and relate to it, now that she had lived similar experiences. again, i will say that it felt too on-the-noose for her mother’s favourite book to be persuasion and to discuss persuasion *inside* a persuasion retelling–but perhaps that is a personal preference again.

lastly, i would like to add that the ‘final plot twist’ made absolutely no sense. if the author had wanted to make this kind of plot twist work, they would have had to make wes (the husband) behave very differently–both in terms of trying to fix his relationship all summer only to apparently be plotting against the main character so he could get her money? but also in terms of how he acted towards their realtor. there was absolutely no indication of anything that our main character suddenly *discovered* (discovered by reading the fucking contract to sell the house, something SOMEBODY surely should have done earlier). it felt like a last-ditch effort to make the audience prefer her relationship with fred, and without feeling guilty that she’d have to get a divorce to do so.

furthermore, the idea of her and fred moving in together (back into her family’s house, which he *obviously* bought for her this whole time (after she lied about not having a fiance)) felt a little nonsensical. it didn’t feel like a healthy and natural start to an adult relationship.

however, i did love the part of the epilogue where she picks her tennis career up again, and this time with the security of having people at home cheering for her and ready to pick up the pieces if she loses again. it was a nice little conclusion to her tennis career subplot, especially when she sacrificed so much for it.

his is a lovely, enjoyable, huggable summer romance read. Nothing too earth shattering and I hear it’s a retelling, but it was enjoyable, easy to listen to and light for the summer.

Olivia Taylor is heading to her home to help her family clean the house out. It's being sold and her father and sister will have to move out. Her husband Wes and her are having marital problems so she packs her stuff up and moves out. She will decide after the summer where she will live. The house is worth a lot of money and they family will each received a nice sum of money.

Olivia meets Fred when they were 15 and 17; over the years they have tried to have a relationship that always seems to blow up. Well Fred is the buyer of her home; seems no one thought to tell her.

This story spans a 20-year relationship of Fred and Olivia. Her friends and family have always interfered in their relationship and now after all the years where is it going this time.

Summer After Summer by Lauren Bailey had well-developed characters and a plot that was engaging. This book was a delight to read. I highly recommend!

**Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for the e-ARC. All opinions expressed are voluntary and my own.**

If you like the movie Love, Rosie, you will like this book. Olivia and Fred's story takes place over 20 years. Though they love each other deeply, they keep missing each other or messing it up, never quite sticking. But MAN this book is good. It's sweet and heartbreaking and surprising. There's a level of mystery and a plot twist at the end that shocks you. It's hard to read books of couples who are so right for each other go back and forth over years. It always hurts my heart because I ache for the years that they miss. But also these types of books are some of my favorites, and Lauren Bailey does an incredible job at it. I honestly wish I could read it again right now for the first time.

Loved the setting, the Hamptons. A typical time to clean out the family home story. Lots of baggage, lots of indecision, lots of doubt. Just didn't hold my interest all the way through.

This had all the potential to be an amazing book, but unfortunately there was too much back and forth, was drawn out and didn’t give me the spark that I was expecting. Definitely could just not be my cup of tea

Summer After Summer is the perfect beach read. Set in the Hamptons, Olivia’s family home has been purchased and she is tasked with cleaning it out. Her sisters are of little help, and have also neglected to tell her who the buyer of their childhood home is, before their Olivia arrives out East, nursing a broken marriage. Lauren Bailey dives into the world of a love triangle, while also telling a love story of a family home and one of sisters.

Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free, electronic ARC of this novel received in exchange for an honest review.

Great book! Even though the story was fairly predictable, I loved the character development and the storyline. I will be looking for more books from Lauren Bailey!