One Perfect Summer by Brenda Novak – a Review

Amazon / B&N / Kobo / BAM / Book Depository / Google Play / Apple

Description: 
When Serenity Alston swabbed her cheek for 23andMe, she joked about uncovering some dark ancestral scandal. The last thing she expected was to discover two half-sisters she never knew existed. Suddenly, everything about her loving family is drawn into question. And meeting these newfound sisters might be the only way to get answers.

While at Serenity’s family’s Lake Tahoe cabin, the three women begin digging into the mystery that has shaken their lives. With Reagan navigating romantic politics at her New York City advertising firm, Lorelei staring down the collapse of her marriage, and Serenity recovering from a messy divorce and traumatizing trial, all three women are converging at a crossroads in their lives. Before the summer is over, they’ll have to confront the paths they walked to get there and determine how to move forward when everything they previously thought to be true might be a lie. Thankfully, they’ll learn together that the future is easier to face with family by your side.

Review: 

One Perfect Summer by Brenda Novak was an excellent read.   Three sisters that come together, and although they look alike, the differences become more obvious.

We start with Serenity (she was the one who started this all off) she’s a writer, she’s also just finished a messy divorce and a trial from hell.

Lorelei has enough on her plate, without coming out into the middle of nowhere, to meet her sister. She’s also on the brink of a divorce!! Her husband is having an affair with her best friend, and the other woman is pregnant! 

Reagan, is dating a married man, it wasn’t meant to happen that way, but she fell in love…. 

Will the three women be able to become the sisters they all seem to need? Or will jealousy and outside forces pull them apart? 

The meeting between the three women who are biological half sisters, is tense, how can it not be, they never knew each other existed. And who is their father? And how did they never know of each other? 

One Perfect Summer was very well written by Novak.  I felt all the emotion that the sisters had felt. The backstory of each woman is crucial in learning about them. But did we really need the amount of information that was dumped on us about the brothers that lived next door? We need a little, but not as much as we got. (But I did wonder if they would get a book to tell us their stories.) And some of the other family members got page time, which sometimes took us away from the main story. 

So what does the future hold for them? Will they find the truth in the past? Or will they be able to let go and forge a bond that will take them into the future. 

And it brings to mind the debate on nurture versus nature, and the sisters definitely had different upbringings. And reading the interaction with Lorelei and her daughter was lovely. The interaction with Serenity and her parents was interesting. 

Reviewed by Julie B

Copy provided by Publisher