LONG PAST SUMMER

A woman with clear focus and ambitious career aspirations has a tough struggle to acknowledge the man she really loves.

Mikaela Marchand was a Black girl—now Black woman—with lofty goals. She’d been planning her departure from small-town Georgia all her life. She and her friend Julie Robertson, who’s White, went through grade school as besties; Julie, “bubbly, wholesome, ridiculously pretty,” and Mikaela with her “witheringly incisive gaze.” A senior prank in which they streaked across their high school football field landed them in the slammer just long enough for Mikaela to be booked by Cameron, a tall, lanky, impossibly good-looking White boy working his way through school. A romance ensues with this budding photographer, but Mikaela leaves Cameron for college and law school in the Big Apple. She’s just short of making partner in a fancy New York law firm and living with Rashad, a handsome Black pediatric resident, when her past comes back with the ferocity of a windstorm. This debut novel addresses what it's like to grow up with absent and deceased parents as well as the pressure on Black professionals to overperform while conforming to White norms. The harsh realities of Julie and Mikaela’s fractured friendship, Mikaela’s fraught relationship with her mother, and Mikaela’s inability to see Cameron for who he is are all developed with skill and empathy. Mikaela’s sister, Vanessa, pokes fun at her, providing pitch-perfect humor. Most of all, Mikaela travels a long road to stop hiding from her own emotions and needs. If the novel feels like it could have been shorter, with multiple moments that could have been stopping points, the payoff is the steamy sex, saved for the end.

This fast-moving novel spotlights a smart woman's journey to find what she wants.