2025 September Reading Wrap Up

 

For September, I ready 6 books for a total of 2233 pages in which 2 were new to me authors 

1) Every Summer After by Carly Fortune:  304 pages   3 stars 

"“I fell in love with you when I was thirteen, and I never stopped. You’re it for me.” Sam closes his eyes for three long seconds, and when he opens them, they are glittering pools under a starry sky.”

2) The Book that Wouldn't Burn by Mark Lawrence:  559 pages   3 Stars

“All of us steal our lives. A little here, a little there. Some of it given, most of it taken. We wear ourselves like a coat of many patches, fraying at the edges, in constant repair. While we shore up one belief, we let go another. We are the stories we tell to ourselves. Nothing more.”

3) Neuromancer by William Gibson  304 pages   4 Stars

“His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.”

4)  Bel Canto by Ann Patchett  318 pages   4 Stars

“If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.”

5)  Framed in Death by J.D. Robb  355 pages    5 Stars

“You can respect somebody without loving them, but if you don’t respect somebody you love, it’s never going to hold up.”

6)  Silver and Lead by Seanan McGuire 393  pages   4 stars

“Trauma moves in cycles. We pass it down, one to another, and there’s no time limit on how long that damage can endure.”

Reading Log as of September 6, 2025 - Every Summer After

 

Every Summer After by Carly Fortune, a romance story published in 2022 (304 pages)

You know those stories in which the past haunts you until you fix it, then everything is okay after that. Years go by and old hurts, old wounds are opened, examined, and broken, new wounds are created, until all is forgiven. Yep, this is one of those.  2.5 stars 

"They say you can never go home again, and for Persephone Fraser, ever since she made the biggest mistake of her life a decade ago, that has felt too true. Instead of glittering summers on the lakeshore of her childhood, she spends them in a stylish apartment in the city, going out with friends, and keeping everyone a safe distance from her heart.

Until she receives the call that sends her racing back to Barry’s Bay and into the orbit of Sam Florek—the man she never thought she’d have to live without.

For six summers, through hazy afternoons on the water and warm summer nights working in his family’s restaurant and curling up together with books—medical textbooks for him and work-in-progress horror short stories for her—Percy and Sam had been inseparable. Eventually that friendship turned into something breathtakingly more, before it fell spectacularly apart.

When Percy returns to the lake for Sam’s mother’s funeral, their connection is as undeniable as it had always been. But until Percy can confront the decisions she made and the years she’s spent punishing herself for them, they’ll never know whether their love might be bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past.

Told over the course of six years and one weekend, Every Summer After is a big, sweeping nostalgic look at love and the people and choices that mark us forever."