Just for the Summer

Just for the Summer by Abby Jimenez Book Review

Every romance award on Goodreads for the last five years has apparently gone to one of two people: Emily Henry or Abby Jimenez. Which is crazy, honestly, that nothing else has managed to crack through the chokehold that these two have. So I figured it was time to give one of them a try.

I did my research. I scrolled through pages and pages of reviews. Just for the Summer kept coming up as one of Jimenez’s highest reviewed books, the creme de la creme, the one that would convert the skeptics.

The premise sounded…charming I suppose: two strangers on Reddit who both believe they’re cursed in love decide to date each other and break up to cancel out their bad luck, then obviously fall for each other instead (not a new concept, but that’s fine). 

 I had just finished Yesteryear (a psychological grenade) and Flowers for Algernon (an even bigger psychological grenade) and Ender’s Game (child genocide, long story) and I wanted something light. Something fun. Something I could read without emotionally bracing myself every thirty pages.

I should have kept scrolling.

Emma is a twenty-eight year old traveling nurse. Justin is a twenty-nine year old software engineer in Minnesota who posts on Reddit about his romantic bad luck and names his dog Brad after his roommate who just got engaged to Justin's ex-girlfriend, which is funny for approximately one page (but the joke keeps going well past its prime). 

Emma sees the post, reaches out, they hatch a plan: she'll redirect her next nursing assignment to Minneapolis, rent a cottage on a private island on Lake Minnetonka with her best friend and foster sister Maddy, they’ll date long enough to break the curse and then go their separate ways.

That is the already-predicatable-premise. What follows is four hundred and thirty-two pages of two extremely nice people being extremely nice to each other and insisting, repeatedly, that they have never felt this safe or this attached or this comfortable with anyone before in their entire lives for some ungodly reason. 

I kept waiting for the reason why this time was different.

It never came.

Let me conduct a little exercise, just for funsies. I finished this book yesterday. Here’s everything I can tell you about Justin as a character: he is nice, he has a good body, he runs sometimes, he loves Minnesota, loves animals, and he is family-oriented.

That’s the complete list. For real.

Now for Emma: she is nice, she is a nurse, and she has significant trauma from her mother Amber, who is narcissistic and unreliable and somehow shows up in Minnesota having already begun a romance with Emma's wealthy surgeon landlord Neil, because this book will pile complications on top of complications regardless of whether those complications are interesting or realistic. 

Four hundred and thirty-two pages and that’s their whole combined personality. I have read longer grocery lists with more character development.

The insta-love is the central problem. Emma and Justin meet and immediately feel this connection is unlike anything they have experienced before, which the book presents as evidence of destiny and which I kept reading as evidence that neither of them had particularly decent previous relationships to compare it to. 

Their dates are pleasant in a vague, inoffensive way. For example, their first date was playing with kittens. I honestly cannot think of something vaguer or more widely appealing to a huge audience.

Their conversations are pleasant. Their chemistry is described in effusive internal monologue by both of them while generating approximately no heat on the actual page. I did not feel it. I wanted to feel it. 

I never did. It’s like Jimenez is so afraid to alienate anyone reading that her characters are the most bland outlines I’ve read in a long time. 

The part that’s a smidge more interesting is the family material. Justin’s mother is going to prison for embezzlement and Justin is suddenly becoming sole legal guardian of three younger siblings, pre-teen Alex, teenage Sarah, and four year old Chelsea, at twenty-nine with no preparation, is a more compelling premise. 

Emma’s situation with Amber is also more interesting than the romance surrounding it: a mother so unreliable she eventually landed Emma in foster care, who shows up in Minnesota and has hidden an entire other child from Emma her whole life, a half-brother named Daniel who was raised by Amber’s parents two hours away in Wakan while Emma was being abandoned. 

The confrontation is a long time coming, but at least Jimenez didn’t chicken out and did deliver on it. 

The problem is that these are the most propulsive elements of a book that is supposed to be a romance, and the love story keeps competing with them for space and losing.

The trauma and family chaos swallow so much of the narrative that the romance feels like a subplot of its own book, which I don’t have to tell you is a bad quality in a novel that is marketed at being primarily a romance. 

The writing does not help. Jimenez writes with a breezy, ultra-modern ease that makes the book go down fast and leaves almost no aftertaste. It reads like good fanfiction, which I mean in the most neutral possible sense: competent, warm, emotionally legible, and entirely without a single sentence that makes you stop because it surprised you.

I read the whole thing in about four days, which I might have called a compliment before I realized it was mostly because nothing demanded enough of my attention to slow me down.

Here is the thing, though. I asked for something light and undemanding that I could consume without emotional consequence, and that is technically, definitionally, what this is. It is not a good book by any standard I usually apply to books.

But it is easy and occasionally warm and I have absolutely read worse (Blood Over Bright Haven’s first three quarters are right there), but nothing about this book will stick with me. 

Recommendation: If you need something undemanding, this will serve its purpose. But this is not a great case to end my boycotting of both Emily Henry and Abby Jimenez, or beach reads in general for that matter. If you need something undemanding I’d much rather watch Love Island USA and leave it there. More like Just for the Summer and Never Again. 

Score: 5/10