Beach Reads
I can’t believe that fall is arriving! Hopefully we get an endless summer with beautiful weather so we can hold onto those beach days just a little longer. The summer of 2023 was a great one for beach reads. From thrillers that kept us up at night to summer romances that made us believe in love again, this summer had everything we needed! If you’re lucky enough to spend your endless summer days with your toes in the sand, here are some of my summer favorites you might have missed that you can pick up today and enjoy!
“The Five-Star Weekend” by Elin Hilderbrand
On the outside, everything about Hollis Shaw’s life looks perfect. She has a handsome heart-surgeon husband, beautiful daughter, and loves her job as a popular food blogger. In one instant, everything she thought she knew to be true changes. Her husband is killed in a car accident on his way to the airport after they had an argument. This only makes the tense relationship between Hollis and her daughter, Caroline, even worse. Then Hollis hears about what people are calling a “Five-Star Weekend.” The idea is to invite a best friend from each phase of one’s life to spend a weekend together. Hollis thinks this would be a great way to get in touch with those she hasn’t had time for and maybe help her get over losing her husband. She invites four friends from the course of her life to come spend the weekend at her beach house in Nantucket. Relationships will be tested, and things might not always work out the way Hollis wants them to. But this weekend changes her life by reminding her what matters most.
“Meet Me at the Lake” by Carley Fortune
Fern Brookbanks is 32, living at home, and running her mother’s lakeside resort. Her life is nothing like she had pictured it would be. She wasted her twenties pining over Will Baxter, someone with whom she had spent just 24 hours when a chance encounter led to a daylong adventure. Their connection was intense from the start, although the timing couldn’t have been worse. Over the course of that day, they shared everything and made a pact to meet up again one year later. Fern showed, but Will didn’t. Now Fern is in desperate need of help, and who other than Will himself shows up at her door, nine years late? He might be the only one who will understand what she’s dealing with, but how can she trust him after he broke their pact? She can tell Will is hiding something. The first time, he rescued her; does she have it in herself to return the favor?
“The True Love Experiment” by Christina Lauren
Felicity “Fizzy” Chen has an incredible career as a romance novelist with a long list of best-sellers. But when she is invited to give a commencement address, she realizes that she isn’t living the life she writes about. Fizzy has never really been in love, and she wonders if the love she wants her readers to believe in really exists at all. Connor Prince is a filmmaker and single dad. He loves making documentaries, and when his boss asks him to create a reality TV show, Connor isn’t sure he is up to the task. His search for a leading lady leads him right to Fizzy. What if he could actually film the queen of romance falling in love herself? Fizzy says she will do it if Connor can agree to meet her lengthy list of demands. He agrees, and “The True Love Experiment” begins.
“The Seven Year Slip” by Ashley Poston
When you are faced with bad days, you have to find a way to move on. When Clementine faces the worst day of her life, she comes up with a plan to protect her heart by just working hard, finding a decent person to love and, according to her aunt, always chase the moon! For a year her plan is working, except for the love part. She has no desire to get close to anyone and get hurt again. Then she finds a strange man in the kitchen of her late aunt’s apartment. He’s the kind of man she would have fallen head over heels for, before. The problem is – he lives in the past. His reality is seven years ago, and she is living seven years in his future. If Clementine lets herself fall, she knows she’ll never recover.
“Summer Reading” by Jenn McKinlay
Samantha Gale is spending the summer in her family’s cottage on Martha’s Vineyard. She plans to spend her time resurrecting her career as a chef before she finds out she has to watch over her half-brother, Tyler. Tyler is spending his summer at the library in a robotics competition. Sam has dyslexia and she would rather be anywhere but the library. Of course, the library’s director is a super-hot guy whose book she accidentally destroyed on their ferry ride to the island. Bennett Reynolds has taken a temporary job on the island to research the summer his mother spent there when she got pregnant with him. He never knew who his father was and he’s on a mission to find out. The last thing Ben wants is a relationship, but when Sam knocks his book into the ocean, he finds himself thinking about her more than he’d like to. Ben inspires Sam to create a cookbook and she helps him look for his father. This might be more than just a summer fling in the making.
“No Two Persons” by Erica Bauermeister
Alice always wanted to be a writer, but she lacked the life experience to really write something gripping. She is super talented, but her stories feel safe and detached. After she experiences a devastating event that leaves her heartbroken, she writes her debut novel that is a huge hit. Readers all over with very different lives are touched by her words and find them a source of inspiration. From a teenager hiding the fact that she is homeless to a bookseller looking for love and a widower consumed by grief, all of these people find life and meaning in what Alice has written. The characters’ stories remind us how important books are, how they affect us, and that we are all more connected than we realize.
