The Summer Series #3
e-ARC provided by Valentine PR
Author: Elizabeth O’Roark
If there is one thing I love in books it’s when an author gets a pretty unlikeable character and turns them around. If you read The Summer I Saved You, you have no love for Kate Bennett. She’s back in Elliot Springs determined to get her husband back. She’ll lie, cheat, do basically anything to recreate the only time in her life she felt truly happy.
But, as expected, she’s not welcomed back in their fold. The only one who has always been there for her is Beck, her husband’s best friend. He offers her a place to stay, even if it will get him in trouble with Caleb. He doesn’t care. He will always do anything for her.
I LOVED this book so much! I was definitely on whatever team that was not Team Kate. But Elizabeth slowly peeled the layers of this complex woman, who has been left and abandoned by everyone, who survived foster care with an Ivy League education and who went through the worst nightmare of all: the loss of a child.
Beck is the stoic best friend, who has loved “Hurricane Kate” even before he knew she was his best friend’s girl. We learn that he was there every single time Caleb wasn’t, holding in all the feelings he had for her.
Now, she’s living in his spare bedroom, parading around in skimpy clothes, cooking him breakfast, sorting out the bookkeeping at the bar and driving him out of his ever loving mind.
Kate’s journey is bumpy. She’s an “Evil Queen” for good part of the book, but you catch glimpses from her past and you see her through Beck’s eyes and pretty soon you are rooting for her to find her way, I love how she has agency in her healing, how she recognizes herself that what she’s doing is horrible and how Beck is not a her savior. He’s what he’s what always been, her safe space – she saves herself. LOVED IT.
Possible triggers: Mentions of drug use and rehab. Historical: loss of a child, living in foster care, child abandonment, secondary character committing suicide. Grief.
