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Review: These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean


Blurb from Goodreads:
Alice isn't like the other Storm siblings. While the rest stayed to battle for their parents' approval, attention, and untold billions, she left, building her own life beyond the family’s name and influence. Nothing could induce her to come back, except the shocking death of her larger-than-life father. Now back on the family’s private island off the Rhode Island coast, she plans to keep her head down, pay the last of her respects, and leave the minute the funeral is over.

Unfortunately, her father had other plans. The eccentric, manipulative patriarch left his widow and their grown children a final challenge--an inheritance game designed to humiliate, devastate, and unravel the Storm family in ways both petty and life-altering. The rules of the game are clear: stay on the island for one week, complete the tasks, receive the inheritance.

One week on Storm Island is an impossible task for Alice. Every corner of the sprawling old house is bursting dysfunctional chaos: Her older sister’s secret love affair. Her brother’s incessant mansplaining. Her sister-in-law’s unapologetic greed. Her younger sister’s obsession with "vibes". Her mother’s penchant for stirring up competition between her children. And all under the stern, watchful gaze of Jack Dean, her father’s enigmatic, unfairly good-looking, second-in-command. It will be a miracle if Alice manages to escape the week unscathed.

A story about the transformative power of grief, love, and family, this luscious novel is at once deliciously clever and surprisingly tender, exploring past secrets, present truths, and futures forged in the wake of wild summer storms.
 
I really enjoyed this up until the ending!  It was so unsatisfying.  The entire premise of the book folded in on itself in what was supposed to be a charming way but truly was not.  This wasn't what I expected but still a great beach read!

These Summer Storms comes out next week on July 8, 2025 and you can purchase HERE.  
He kissed her. Or maybe she kissed him. Later, she wouldn't be able to decide, because she wanted to kiss him so much in that moment, on that beach, where she'd spent the majority of her childhood imagining kissing someone, she couldn't remember what was truth and what was fantasy.
Whatever the truth, Jack made it feel like fantasy, slanting his kiss over hers like the pirate who'd dived into the sea, leaving his ship behind, to follow her to shore. Except he'd been furious then. She'd seen it in his controlled, perfect motions.
This wasn't controlled. It wasn't furious. But it was perfect.

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