It Happened One Summer
Tessa Bailey, 2021
A socialite exiled to a fishing town meets a grumpy captain in a banter-first rom-com about learning to haul your own weight—and letting someone help.
Feels like longing and tenderness. About love and identity.
A page from the book
The exact panic of accidentally letting someone know you were looking.
Brendan cleared his throat hard. “What does ‘follow’ mean?”“Don’t,” Deke rushed to say. “Don’t press it.”His thumb was already on the way back up. “Too late.”All three of his crew members surged to their feet. “No. Brendan, don’t tell me you just tapped the blue button,” Sanders groaned, hands on his mop of red hair. “She’s going to see you followed her. She’s going to know you internet stalked her.”“Can’t I just unfollow now?” Brendan started to tap again.Fox lunged forward. “No! No, that’s even worse. If she already noticed you followed her, she’s just going to think you’re playing games.”“Jesus. I’m deleting the whole thing,” Brendan said, throwing the offending device onto the dashboard. Tessa Bailey.Tessa Bailey has said the novel was inspired by Schitt's Creek, with Piper as an Alexis-like socialite dropped into a working town.
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Questions readers ask
- What is It Happened One Summer like?
- Feels like longing and tenderness. About love and identity.
- What should I read after It Happened One Summer?
- If you liked It Happened One Summer, try Better Than the Movies (Lynn Painter), Problematic Summer Romance (Ali Hazelwood) and Great Big Beautiful Life (Emily Henry).
A taste of the feed
A mother, a sundress, a stolen base: the anatomy of a kept memory.
All the neighborhood kids played kickball in the street for hours that night, and the adults even joined us for a game. At one point, my mother was high-fiving Michael after stealing home base in her floral sundress and wedge sandals. That moment was pressed in my memories like a yellowed photograph in an antique album.
Better Than the Movies · Lynn Painter
A therapist's phrase that turns a ruined adolescence into construction material.
You built a nice adulthood over the ruins of a shitty adolescence,” my therapist once said, and I enjoy the mental image of it. The idea of life as something I could choose, cultivate day by day, curate and nurture. Being mindful, instead of reactive.
Problematic Summer Romance · Ali Hazelwood
The compliment that sounds like an insult until it isn’t.
I think you live in a world that’s more interesting than the one most people live in,” he says, and just as my heart starts to sink with disappointment, with a kind of loneliness, he adds, “and I wish I could live in it too.” I feel myself beaming. “I’ll take you sometime.” “I’d like that,” he says.
Great Big Beautiful Life · Emily Henry
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