Category: Romance

Title: Meet Me at the Lake
Author: Carley Fortune
Genre: Contemporary, Romance
Publisher: Viking
Source: Tandem Collective
Format: Paperback
Release Date: May 2, 2023
Rating: ★★★★

Goodreads Synopsis:

Fern Brookbanks has wasted far too much of her adult life thinking about Will Baxter. She spent just twenty-four hours in her early twenties with the aggravatingly attractive, idealistic artist, a chance encounter that spiraled into a daylong adventure in Toronto. The timing was wrong, but their connection was undeniable: they shared every secret, every dream, and made a pact to meet one year later. Fern showed up. Will didn’t.

At thirty-two, Fern’s life doesn’t look at all how she once imagined it would. Instead of living in the city, Fern’s back home, running her mother’s Muskoka lakeside resort–something she vowed never to do. The place is in disarray, her ex-boyfriend’s the manager, and Fern doesn’t know where to begin.

She needs a plan–a lifeline. To her surprise, it comes in the form of Will, who arrives nine years too late, with a suitcase in tow and an offer to help on his lips. Will may be the only person who understands what Fern’s going through. But how could she possibly trust this expensive-suit wearing mirage who seems nothing like the young man she met all those years ago. Will is hiding something, and Fern’s not sure she wants to know what it is.

But ten years ago, Will Baxter rescued Fern. Can she do the same for him?

Review:

On June 14, ten years ago, Fern Brookbanks spent twenty-four hours with Will Baxter. He was an artist who took her on a tour of Toronto for one of her final days in the city. They hadn’t met before that day, but they made plans to meet exactly one year later at Fern’s family’s resort in Huntsville. The following year, Fern waited for Will but he didn’t show up. Now, thirty-two year old Fern is returning to her family’s resort because her mother died in a sudden accident. Fern is trying to take over the resort with no experience or desire to work there. Then, Will shows up at the resort with an offer to help her figure it out. Fern needs the help and she has been waiting for Will for ten years, but she must decide if she’s willing to open herself up to possibly getting hurt again. 

It is very hard not to compare this book to Every Summer After. It’s by the same author and has a similar storyline: a woman who grew up in Ontario’s cottage country, moves to Toronto as an adult but must return home after a death in the family and face the love of her life who she hasn’t seen in years. Probably if I hadn’t read these books back to back and if they hadn’t come out a year apart they wouldn’t have seemed as similar. Every Summer After was relatable and had a lot of strong emotions. Meet Me at the Lake didn’t evoke the same emotions in me but I liked the ending. I appreciated how much the author said in the acknowledgments that writing this one was more difficult than her first book. Every Summer After would be a hard book to follow up due to its huge success, but this one is a good summer beach read. 

Meet Me at the Lake is a great second chance summer romance!

Thank you Tandem Collective and Penguin Random House Canada for sending me a copy!

Content warnings: death of parent, anxiety, marijuana use, death by car accident, parental abandonment, teen pregnancy

What to read next:

Every Summer After by Carley Fortune

Have you read Meet Me at the Lake? What did you think of it?

Title: Every Summer After
Author: Carley Fortune
Genre: Contemporary, Romance
Publisher: Berkley
Source: Tandem Collective
Format: Paperback
Release Date: May 10, 2022
Rating: ★★★★★

Goodreads Synopsis:

They say you can never go home again, and for Persephone Fraser, ever since she made the biggest mistake of her life a decade ago, that has felt too true. Instead of glittering summers on the lakeshore of her childhood, she spends them in a stylish apartment in the city, going out with friends, and keeping everyone a safe distance from her heart.

Until she receives the call that sends her racing back to Barry’s Bay and into the orbit of Sam Florek—the man she never thought she’d have to live without.

For six summers, through hazy afternoons on the water and warm summer nights working in his family’s restaurant and curling up together with books—medical textbooks for him and work-in-progress horror short stories for her—Percy and Sam had been inseparable. Eventually that friendship turned into something breathtakingly more, before it fell spectacularly apart.

When Percy returns to the lake for Sam’s mother’s funeral, their connection is as undeniable as it had always been. But until Percy can confront the decisions she made and the years she’s spent punishing herself for them, they’ll never know whether their love might be bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past. 

Told over the course of six years and one weekend, Every Summer After is a big, sweeping nostalgic look at love and the people and choices that mark us forever.

Six summers to fall in love. One moment to fall apart. A weekend to get it right.

Review:

Persephone Fraser made the biggest mistake of her life twelve years ago. She no longer spends summers at a cottage in Barry’s Bay, now working as a magazine editor in Toronto. However, when she receives a phone call that her former neighbour passed away, she rushes back to her summer home and back to her former best friend, Sam Florek. Percy and Sam were inseparable for six summers in their teenage years, working together in his family’s restaurant and swimming in the lake. But then something happened to make them not speak for twelve years. Now, Percy has to confront her past and try to fix her big mistake. 

This story really tugged at my heartstrings. It was an extremely slow burn romance. I kept wishing Sam and Percy would get together sooner because their chemistry was so strong. The big revelations at the end were heartbreaking. My only critique is that the ending seemed quite short. I would have liked to see more of a happily every after for Percy and Sam because their romance was short lived on the pages. 

Every Summer After is the perfect summer romance!

Thank you Tandem Collective and Penguin Random House Canada for sending me a copy of this book!

Content warnings: death of parent, panic attacks, anxiety, alcohol use, cheating

What to read next:

Meet Me at the Lake by Carley Fortune

Have you read Every Summer After? What did you think of it?

Title: Two for the Road
Author: Chantel Guertin
Genre: Romance, Contemporary
Publisher: Penguin Random House Canada
Source: Publisher
Format: Paperback arc
Release Date: March 28, 2023
Rating: ★★★★★

Goodreads Synopsis:

Note: This is the Canadian title and same book as GIGI, LISTENING in the USA. For readers of Emily Henry, Gail Honeyman and Josie Silver, a tender, funny and wise new novel about a romance bookshop owner who embarks on the adventure–or misadventure–of a lifetime in search of her own happily ever after.

Sometimes there are detours on the road to love . . . 
Gigi Rutherford loves love stories. She reads them, she sells them at her romance bookstore, and she could spend hours imagining the meet-cutes of every couple she encounters. But beyond her shop’s walls, Gigi is out of stock when it comes to her own love interests. And instead of enduring bad date after bad date, these days she’d rather curl up at home with her favourite audiobook and the only man that makes her heart skip a beat: Zane Wilkenson, the smooth-voiced narrator that Gigi is convinced is her soulmate.

Then, she’s presented with the chance of a lifetime: a ten-day bus tour through the hills of the English countryside, taking in the sights and sounds of a world an ocean away from her bookstore–all in the presence of Zane, the man of her dreams, in person, as he leads the tour.

But things don’t go as planned. When Gigi arrives at the bus terminal in London, Zane is nowhere to be found. Until he shows up, she’s stuck with an eclectic group of fellow travellers she’d rather not be with on a long road trip: the recently widowed and chatty Charlotte; odd Francis, a walking Trivial Pursuit; Jenny, a true-crime-makeup YouTuber documenting every detail for her subscribers; and Sindhi and Roshi, a long-married couple that just can’t stop bickering. And then there’s the brooding bus driver, Taj, who Gigi finds infuriating but also incredibly alluring . . .

With heart and charm, warmth and humour, Chantel Guertin explores the meaning of love and family–and how, sometimes, the journey to yourself is where you’ll find everything you’ve been searching for.

Review:

Gigi Rutherford runs a romance bookstore in Ann Arbor. She’s had many bad dates from dating apps, but who she really wants is Zane Wilkinson, the narrator of her favourite audiobook. For Gigi’s thirtieth birthday, her friends surprise her with a trip to England to go on the bus tour that Zane guides as his regular job. However, when she arrives at the bus tour, Zane isn’t there. Gigi still goes on the tour, but she’s stuck hanging out with Taj, the brooding bus driver. Though the trip doesn’t start out as she planned, Gigi may still find what she was looking for. 

This was such a cute story. Gigi references a lot of novels throughout the story, which avid readers will recognize. I always love it when characters like to read. There were some emotional parts in the story, such as when Gigi talked about her parents’ deaths. I liked that some key parts of the characters’ pasts were kept from the reader until close to the end, which made their histories seem more mysterious. Gigi and Taj were a grumpy/sunshine pair. There was a little bit of enemies to lovers, which is one of my favourite tropes. 

Two for the Road is an exciting book about a fun England road trip and a cute romance!

Two for the Road will be published in Canada on March 28, with the same story being published as Gigi, Listening in the United States. 

Thank you Penguin Random House Canada for sending me a physical copy and Kensington for sending me a digital copy. 

Content warnings: death of parents, car accident (mentioned), parental estrangement, early onset Alzheimer’s

What to read next:

The Road Trip by Beth O’Leary

Have you read Two for the Road? What did you think of it?

Title: Forget Me Not
Author: Julie Soto
Genre: Romance, Contemporary
Publisher: Forever
Source: Publisher
Format: Ebook
Release Date: July 11, 2023
Rating: ★★★★★

Goodreads Synopsis:

An ambitious wedding planner must work with her grumpy florist ex, whose heart she broke, on the most high-profile wedding of her career, in this spicy and emotional romance from popular fanfic author Julie Soto.

He loves me; he loves me not…

Ama Torres loves being a wedding planner. But with a mother who has been married more times than you can count on your fingers, Ama has decided that marriage is not the route for her. But weddings? Weddings are amazing. As a small business owner, she knows how to match her clients with the perfect vendor to give them the wedding of their dreams. Well, almost perfect…

Elliot hates being a florist, most of the time. When his father left him the flower shop, he considered it a burden, but he’s stuck with it. Just like how he’s stuck with the way he proposed to Ama, his main collaborator and girlfriend (or was she?) two years ago. But flowers have grown on him, just like Ama did. And flowers can’t run off and never speak to him again, like Ama did. 

When Ama is hired to plan a celebrity wedding that will bring her business national exposure, there’s a catch: Elliot is already contracted to design the flowers. Things are not helped by the two brides, who see the obvious chemistry between Ama and Elliot and are determined to set them up, not knowing their complicated history. Add in a meddling ex-boss, and a reality TV film crew documenting every step of the wedding prep, and Ama and Elliot’s hearts are not only in jeopardy again, but this time, their livelihoods are too.

Review:

Ama Torres is a wedding planner who doesn’t think a wedding is in her future. She loves a wedding, which she considers just a party, but after seeing her mother get divorced sixteen times, she doesn’t want to get married herself. When she lands the biggest wedding of the year with celebrity Hazel Renee, the catch is that she will have to work with florist Elliot Bloom. Elliot and Ama were dating years ago, but it ended suddenly. Their clients can see the undeniable chemistry between them, so they take every chance they can to get them together. Ama and Elliot have to figure out if they can make it work this time or if their plans for the future are just too far apart. 

This story was beautiful and hilarious. It starts with Ama comforting a bride with cold feet telling her that this wedding is just a party, and the marriage doesn’t necessarily have to last forever. That’s not at all what I would expect a wedding planner to say to a bride on her wedding day, so I knew this would be an entertaining read. 

Ama and Elliot had an enemies-to-lovers, second chance romance. There was loads of steam involved too. They seemed like opposites yet their chemistry was just too strong to deny. 

Forget Me Not is an entertaining and steamy rom com, coming out this summer!

Thank you Forever for providing a digital copy of this book on the Fable app!

Content warnings: divorce, death of parent (by cancer, not on page), relationship break up, broken bones

What to read next:

The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren

Have you read Forget Me Not? What did you think of it?