We'll Always Have Summer
Jenny Han, 2011
Romance Young adultContemporary fiction
The last summer before adulthood, when first love stops being a season and starts asking for a life. Warm, wistful and quick, with a first-person voice that lingers on memory, longing and the ordinary texture of summer.
Feels like longing and nostalgia. About love, friendship and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy YA romance that follows long-running relationships and summer nostalgia. It is the third book in a series, though, so the history and emotional weight assume you have read the first two.
Why read it
It catches the moment when young love stops being easy and starts asking for choices, giving you a clear-eyed, nostalgic summer read.
A page from the book
The sensible reason she gave for choosing that college, and the truer one she kept to herself.
We were just together. It all happened so easily and so quickly that it felt like it had always been that way. One minute we were friends, then we were kissing, and then the next thing I knew, I was applying to the same college as him. I told myself and everyone else (including him, including my mother especially) that it was a good school, that it was only a few hours from home and it made sense to apply there, that I was keeping my options open. All of those things were true. But truest of all was that I just wanted to be near him. I wanted him for all seasons, not just summer. Jenny Han.Jenny Han worked as a children's book editor in New York before her own YA novels were published.
Books that feel like this
More by Jenny Han
To All the Boys I've Loved Before
Jenny Han, 2014
A girl writes secret letters to every boy she's loved—then they get mailed. A warm, funny novel about sisters, first love, and the mess of being seen.
It's Not Summer Without You
Jenny Han, 2010
A grief-stricken summer, two brothers, and a girl who can’t let go of the house that made her.
The Summer I Turned Pretty
Jenny Han, 2009
A girl returns to the beach house where she grew up and finds the boys she's known forever looking at her differently.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is We'll Always Have Summer for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy YA romance that follows long-running relationships and summer nostalgia. It is the third book in a series, though, so the history and emotional weight assume you have read the first two.
- What is We'll Always Have Summer like?
- Warm, wistful and quick, with a first-person voice that lingers on memory, longing and the ordinary texture of summer. Feels like longing and nostalgia. About love, friendship and memory.
- What should I read after We'll Always Have Summer?
- If you liked We'll Always Have Summer, try Water for Elephants (Sara Gruen), People We Meet on Vacation (Emily Henry) and Beautiful Disaster (Jamie McGuire).
A taste of the feed
The moment you stop knowing your own age without counting.
When you are five, you know your age down to the month. Even in your twenties, you know how old you are. I’m twenty-three you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties, something strange starts to happen. It is a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I’m—you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you are not. You’re thirty-five. And then you’re bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it’s decades before you admit it.
Water for Elephants · Sara Gruen
The oldest child who learned to keep everything buttoned up.
Alex Nilsen is a study in control. In that tall, broad, permanently slouched and/or pretzel-folded body of his, there’s a surplus of stoicism (the result of being the oldest child of a widower with the most vocal anxiety of anyone I’ve ever met) and a stockpile of repression (the result of a strict religious upbringing in direct opposition to most of his passions; namely, academia), alongside the most truly strange, secretly silly, and intensely softhearted goofball I’ve had the pleasure to know.
People We Meet on Vacation · Emily Henry
What it sounds like to be told you're the one thing someone got right.
You know why I want you? I didn’t know I was lost until you found me. I didn’t know what alone was until the first night I spent without you in my bed. You’re the one thing I’ve got right. You’re what I’ve been waiting for, Pigeon.
Beautiful Disaster · Jamie McGuire
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