Beach read- 5⭐️

A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.

They’re polar opposites.

In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they’re living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer’s block.

Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. Really.

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✨My Opinion✨

I laughed out loud and cried, multiple times. It was such a realist look at the romance genre that I couldn’t look at it as just another contemporary romance. It covers parental loss and seeing parents as humans rather than heroes, sifting through childhood abuse trauma (not as much as it could have), found family, parental loss, grumpy-broken sunshine, personal healing, second chance romance, rivals to lovers, dysfunctional family, mending relationships, second chance romance... Add onto that cute banter and Michigan U.P. Beach vibes.

This isn’t a light vacation read, the title is misdirecting/ironic in that aspect. So don’t read this at the beach unless you want to be quietly crying in public.

I wish we had a little more of Gus’s POV. He isn’t a talker and since we only meet wading in the grief January, seeing his attraction to her isn’t quite as clear… not that I wanted this to be dual POV. I didn’t.

But I did love this book.

-E