Review #3: That Summer

“Summer bachelors like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.”
— Nora Ephron

I picked this book because I came across a quote from it while wandering the internet:

Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding that exact point when everything changed.

Now, this appealed to me. It was the end of a summer where I finally fell for a guy who fell for me back. He became my first kiss. It was also the summer I realized that dating my best guy friend wouldn’t be so terrible. He’s my current boyfriend. Yes, those were two different boys. It got a little complicated, I’ll admit. I won’t go into it now.

In any case, that summer felt like the one from the quote. It felt like the summer when everything changed. Not a huge change, more like a small shift that made everything look a little different, a little brighter.

So I bought a copy of the book for myself, and it sat on my pile for a little while, until now. It finally made it to the top of my pile, and I dove straight in.

That Summer isn’t a long book, coming in at slightly less than 200 pages. It feels like a lot happens within its covers, though. There is a lot of growth for Haven, our protagonist, both physically and emotionally. It’s the summer where everyone else seems to abandon her, and the one person who seems to understand her, comes to hurt her. It’s a book about growing up, and I really appreciate that, being a teen myself.

The book is definitely meant for teens, and isn’t really the type of thing I could picture adults reading. Overall, it’s a good book, and I’d recommend it to anyone in the teen demographic.

7/10

Next on that pile of mine is Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe by Jennie Shortridge.