Blog Tour Review: The Edge of Summer by Erica George

Jenny (jenjenreviews)

Rating: 4 out of 5.

A story about loss, grief, and learning to love.

Thank you so much to TBR and Beyond Tours and Erica George for allowing me to be part of this experience and also providing me with a complimentary eARC and media kit!

Book Information

Genre: Young Adult Contemporary Romance
Publishing Date: June 14, 2022

Fans of Sarah Dessen and Morgan Matson will be swept away by this big-hearted novel about one girl navigating first loss and first love during her summer on Cape Cod.

Saving the whales has been Coriander Cabot and her best friend Ella’s dream since elementary school. But when tragedy strikes, Cor is left to complete the list of things they wanted to accomplish before college alone, including a marine biology internship on Cape Cod.

Cor’s summer of healing and new beginnings turns complicated when she meets Mannix, a local lifeguard who completely takes her breath away. But she knows whatever she has with Mannix might not last, and that her focus should be on rescuing the humpback whales from entanglement. As the tide changes, Cor finds herself distracted and struggling with her priorities.

Can she follow her heart and keep her promise to the whales and her best friend?

Content and Trigger Warnings

For a list of warnings, tropes, and representation for this book, check out its page on BookTriggerWarnings.com.

About the Author

Erica George is a writer of young adult fiction. She is a graduate of The College of New Jersey with degrees in both English and education, and is currently an MFA student at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She resides in scenic northern New Jersey, but spends her summers soaking up the salty sea air on Cape Cod.

Many themes in Erica’s writing rotate around environmental activism and helping young people find their voice. When she’s not writing, you can find her exploring river towns, whale watching, or engrossed in quality British drama with her dog at her side.

Author Links:

Review (no spoilers)

If you’d like to follow along with the rest of the tour, you can find the tour schedule here.

Welcome to a new week, everyone! Today I have a review for an upcoming young adult contemporary romance novel. When I realized that this book was called The Edge of Summer, I had to chuckle a bit because I recently read a book called Summer’s Edge (review here) that is basically the complete opposite of this one. Summer’s Edge was a YA thriller/horror novel with a lot of dark murderous themes while The Edge of Summer was a light contemporary romance novel about two teenagers learning what matters most to them.

The book follows a 17-year old high school student, Cor, as she struggles with both guilt and grief following the death of her estranged best friend Ella. When Cor decides to do a marine biology internship during her summer in Cape Cod, she meets a charming lifeguard named Maddix who quickly sweeps her off her feet. Soon she finds herself forced to choose between her newfound romance and honoring all the promises she made to Ella in the past.

Seeing as it is currently summer, now is the perfect time for this book to be released. It’s a quick read that manages to be a feel-good story while also dealing with themes of loss and grief. Both Cor and Maddix are going through a lot of emotional turmoil of who they want to be vs who their loved ones expect them to be. It’s a very relatable issue and I have no doubt that it will speak to the book’s target audience.

Throughout the novel, there’s this repeated theme of Cor seeing and hearing Ella speak to her. This is something I see in basically any book about grief and it’s gotten to the point where I’m wondering if this is an actual common phenomenon in humans after experiencing loss, or if it’s simply a writing tool that authors have continuing using to help push their stories along. I can’t tell how I feel about it yet.

My only real complaint about Summer’s Edge is that I didn’t think Cor went through enough character development. There are several scenes from the past that reveal her as previously being selfish, sensitive, and afraid to stand up for herself and others. I thought the point of these was to show how much she’s grown by the end of the novel, but when I finished the book, I still felt like she was all of these things, just slightly less so. She is, however, only 18 years old. She has a lot of time to figure herself out.

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