SAME TIME NEXT SUMMER

On the eve of her wedding, a woman runs into the teenage love who broke her heart.

Sam has her life all figured out. She’s got Jack, her perfect doctor fiance; a nice Manhattan apartment; and a job she’s good at (even if she might have just messed it up). Now she’s headed out to her family’s Long Island beach house to tour a potential wedding venue and finally introduce Jack to the kind of summers she grew up with, even though they might be a little less straight-laced than he’s used to. What she wasn’t anticipating was that Wyatt—the boy next door she was in love with all through her childhood and whom she hasn’t seen since she was 17, when he broke her heart—would be there, cheerfully enmeshed back in her family. Long-forgotten feelings bubble under the surface as Sam must figure out if the life she’s created is the one she really wants. The book jumps back and forth in time, starting in the present and flashing back chronologically through Sam and Wyatt’s growing-up years, relationship, and breakup. This means there’s a lot of buildup for the inevitable split, and it’s impossible for the breakup not to feel like a letdown. The story also feels lopsided in that the modern-day sections (with one small exception) are narrated by Sam while the flashback sections alternate between Sam’s and Wyatt’s points of view. While that structure does let the reader understand why Wyatt did what he did as a teen, it’s an odd contrast with the mysterious Wyatt of the present. The book would have been stronger if it had either fully stayed with Sam’s journey or followed both leads. Interesting side characters are left disappointingly half-baked to focus on fairly standard protagonists.

A love story with a lot of bark but little bite.