A Summer Lasts Forever by Tamar Anolic

A Summer Lasts Forever by Tamar Anolic
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Young Adult (14 – 18 y.o.), Historical
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

When sixteen-year-old Ginny Edmunds’ father uproots her family for a summer to take a fellowship at Bennington College, Ginny isn’t happy. She’s never heard of Bennington, and she’s never been to Vermont. She just wishes she could stay at home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where she has her own friends and even a new boyfriend she’s been interested in for years. But at a family-owned store in Bennington, Ginny meets Sam and Ben Morton, the cute teenaged brothers that are being raised to take over the store one day. Immediately, Ginny is intrigued by them and their world. As she also makes other friends, Ginny finds her place in Bennington.

Eighteen-year-old Sam Morton hates working at the store. It’s been in his family for six generations, and as the oldest son, he’s expected to subvert his life to keep the place running. He would rather lose himself in his artwork, but his strict father makes that impossible. When Sam sees Ginny shopping in the store, he notices her immediately.

Can Ginny and Sam overcome their differences and their insecurities to move forward with their lives?

Change is inevitable.

The most interesting conflict involved the struggle between Sam and his father as they tried to figure out what Sam’s future would be. He was old enough to make his own decisions about future college and career plans, and yet his father still demanded that this character follow in the footsteps of the six previous generations and run the family store. This was something I found myself deeply invested in as their arguments about what should happen only grew louder and more insistent on both sides.

I struggled with how the romantic subplot played out. The characters involved in it spent most of this book gradually showing more and more interest in each other only for this storyline to suddenly end without a resolution. While I don’t require a HEA ending by any means, this relationship played out in such an unusual way that I’m not even sure I should classify this as a romance even though I would have been interested in seeing where those characters ended up either as a couple or as two single college students in the future.

The plot twists in this novel were otherwise well developed and fit the character development nicely. I’m not the sort of reader who must be taken off guard by where the plot goes in order to think a twist was good one, but it was still refreshing to eventually flip to those pages and realize that I hadn’t anticipated what was going to happen in those scenes. Obviously, I can’t share any details about what exactly happened, but kudos to Ms. Anolic for keeping me on my toes.

A Summer Lasts Forever was full of surprises.