Seven Summers by Paige Toon

Oh boy, this book!!

First of all, I think it’s important to state that I personally don’t think this is a standard romance. Yes, it has a HEA but I don’t think it’s a typical HEA, and Liv’s journey to her happy ending was ROUGH! I would class this more as Women’s Fiction. I make the distinction because to me a standard romance will have it’s ups and downs, there may be some other love interests involved but I don’t see a MC being in love with more than one person as a classic romance.

That’s just my classification and not a standard rule!

So not a standard romance in my opinion but it was a good read. It was very emotional and I was really invested in the story overall. The setting was lovely as well. I’ve always wanted to go to Cornwall, and reading this made me feel the need to move that up a bit.

Liv and Finn’s beginning was so sweet and had that lovely magical first love feeling to it. I wonder if tragedy hadn’t struck would they have maintained that connection? It felt a lot like they bonded over trauma. I was shouting for them during each of those early summers they saw each other but as those summers went on it was easy to see the cracks in their relationship. They were both in such different places in their lives, and even if Liv was using Michael as an excuse to stay in St. Agnes, she was also trying to heal. I think Finn had too much trauma from his childhood to ever consider that Liv needed the ties to her parents home in order to heal. It was all very sad, but they were so young, I think the way things went was the only way they could go at that time in their lives.

And then came Tom!

I think it was very important for both Liv and Finn to have other relationships, but I wasn’t expecting one of them to find another great love. Liv absolutely deserved to find someone like Tom. For some reason I felt like Finn messed her about, which could be seen as a stretch but it just felt like, even though he loved her, she was never put first. Tom, with his own trauma, had a way of making Liv a priority, and she did a wonderful job of giving him space to deal with his life being turned upside-down. I ended up really rooting for these two, I knew what was coming but I still wanted them to have their HEA, and I guess they did, but it just ended too soon.

An then came the epilogues!

I feel like the bits with Tom shouldn’t have been in the epilogue, they were poignant and heartbreaking and that just doesn’t feel right in an epilogue. Maybe Toon was using the epilogues as a way of saying that everything that happened after ‘This Summer — The Seventh Summer’ was a happy ending of sorts. Even when the heartbreaking happens, love was felt all round.

I will definitely read more Paige Toon but I feel like I’ll need to be in the mood for a good cry, this book was so emotional and it totally bummed me out, but in that, ‘Oh I needed that big cry!’ kind of way!

Something I love in a book is a playlist, I enjoyed the playlist in this book a lot and it did a great job in capturing first love.

Seven Summers playlist:

Sweater Weather — The Neighbourhood

Solid — Liily

Figure It Out — Royal Blood

Stars on CCTV — Hard-Fi

Need You Tonight — INSX

Solar Power — Lorde

7 — Catfish and the Bottlemen

‘Tis the Damn Season — Taylor Swift

Go with the Flow — Queens of the Stone Age

I Need My Girl — The National

Ready to Start — Arcade Fire

Stay — Rihanna ft. Mikky Ekko

Space & Time — Wolf Alice

7 Minutes — Dean Lewis

Michael — Franz Ferdinand

TV — Billie Eilish

The Beach II — Wolf Alice

Never Tear Us Apart — INXS

22 — Taylor Swift

Fire — Kasabian

Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors — Editors

Saturn — Sleeping At Last

The Boys of Summer — The Ataris

Here Comes the Sun — The Beatles

Synopsis:

Six summers to fall in love. One summer to change everything.

Liv and Finn meet six summers ago working in a bar on the rugged Cornish coastline, their futures full of promise. When a night of passion ends in devastating tragedy they are bound together inextricably. But Finn’s life is in LA with his band, and Liv’s is in Cornwall with her family—so they make a promise. Finn will return every year, and if they are single they will spend the summer together.

This summer Liv crosses paths with Tom—a mysterious new arrival in her hometown. As the wildflowers and heather come into bloom, they find themselves falling for one another. For the first time Liv can imagine a world where her heart isn’t broken every autumn. Now Liv must make an impossible choice. And when she discovers the shocking reason that Tom has left home, she’ll need to trust her heart even more . . .