Carley Fortune takes on the proverbial forbidden fruit in sizzling new romance novel

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• Title: This Summer Will Be Different
• Author: Carley Fortune
• Genre: Fiction
• Publisher: Penguin Canada
• Pages: 368

At the risk of having all the subtlety of Anne Shirley slamming a slate down on Gilbert Blythe’s head – which is to say, none at all – I must declare up front that this book is fantastic.

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This book is also a true kindred spirit, in fact, for any little girl who worshiped at the altar of L.M. Montgomery, declared “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes” when confronted with the disappointing tourist spectacle that is the so-called Green Gables homestead, and then grew up to love the kind of books that felt like all those Anne stories did: unashamedly romantic, in both the poetic and literal sense; balanced with a clear-eyed intelligence; dreamy, cozy and entirely transportive.

In short: Carley Fortune’s This Summer Will Be Different is everything you could ask for in a romance novel aimed squarely at the nostalgic millennial heart. And, thank Aphrodite, not an “enemies-to-lovers” tale either, a trope that needs to sit the next few publishing cycles out, please – which would have been an easy route for Fortune to take as an Anne of Green Gables fan telling a story set on Prince Edward Island.

Instead, Fortune’s tale is about forbidden fruit. The story starts when our heroine Lucy (see what she did there?), the archetypal Toronto city girl with a soulless corporate job, finds herself unexpectedly alone on PEI when her best friend, a native islander, is delayed in joining her. Like any good tourist, she sidles up to an oyster bar – and locks eyes with a startling handsome local expertly shucking bivalves behind the counter.

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A good litmus test to see if this book is for you? Whether you find Fortune’s description of someone “undressing an oyster” to be the height of crackling eroticism or a full body eye roll. Ditto flirting as “an invitation to play” and lazy lovemaking (mostly happening off camera, the chicest kind of spice) characterized as “warm caramel sauce sliding down a scoop of ice cream.”

If, even out of context, that kind of cheeky-but-somehow-steamy stuff sounds exactly your speed, prepare to luxuriate in 300 more pages of that as we follow Lucy – who only realized that the oyster-prepping hottie was her best friend’s off-limits little brother after they’d slept together – across several years of trying (and mostly failing) to resist the attraction that pulls them together like magnets each time she’s on the island.

And, given that Felix is a dream hero par excellence – he only reads classic literature, he notices that she loves Cows Creamery cultured butter and makes sure it’s in the fridge for her, he’s got sparkling blue eyes with a single hazel spot – you can hardly blame her, despite the fact that she’s kept their entire relationship a secret from her best friend.

That best friend, by the way, is also the narrative device that creates just the tiniest bit of jeopardy (beyond the “when will they realize they’ve loved each other all along,” of course) to propel our story along. It’s how we get Lucy – now working as a florist in the Toronto store she inherited from her Aunt Stacy (another lovely wink to Montgomery’s world!) – onto PEI, rushing to be with her friend after she suddenly bolts home just a week before her wedding, refusing to explain what’s going on.

Unlike Fortune’s two previous books – both No. 1 bestsellers, one being adapted by the production company of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan, for Netflix – this book has a lighter touch when it comes to Important Themes. (Her previous books took on things such as parental mental health and grief.) On the Emotional Wringer scale, it’s far less Colleen Hoover, far more Emily Henry.

There’s still plenty of thoughtful, nuanced exploration of adult emotions in this book – it’s what makes the love story so satisfying – but it does also feel like Fortune, a former journalist and editor, is now confident enough in merit of the love stories she is telling that she doesn’t need to justify them by also loading in so-called meatier material to “worthy” them up a bit. Or perhaps she just felt like writing something a little bit less intense this time!

Either way, this is fizzier and more effervescent than her previous stories, in a way that’s delightful and precisely what you want to be reading in the month of July – whether you’ve been inspired by the novel to take it to a beach on Prince Edward Island (Fortune should win a medal for services to Canadian tourism, seriously) or just shivering in the chill of an over air-conditioned cubicle (when the boss isn’t looking).

If there is a very, very small fly in this unctuous lobster roll of a reading experience, it’s that Fortune has relied on a similar “something happened between two people several years ago; we meet them again one fateful summer” structure that she’s used for her two previous novels. This may very well be intentional – the fact that all her books are set in the summer is certainly a clever strategic choice aimed straight at the beach-read market – but it risks becoming predictable or same-y if she continues it on her fourth, hopefully due at the same time next year.

For now, however, I wouldn’t want this summer to be any different than this one is.