Book Review - The Best Summer of Our Lives

I have been waiting and waiting and waiting for the latest release from Rachel Hauck. That’s the problem with preordering. You know it is coming, like Christmas, but you can only count down until the day the clouds part and the book angels sing to announce its arrival in the mailbox. You dance your happy dance, (the neighbors are free to think what they want to think,) pluck your treasure from the box, and happy dance back inside before your glisten turns to sweaty drowned rat. You crack open the book to devour it. Then you realize this one is going to take some time. There’s a lot to unravel in The Best Summer of Our Lives. If you’re worried that you’ve overspent, please allow me to put those fears to rest. Clocking in at 376 pages, Hauck is giving you what you paid and waited for. Not a single page is wasted on frivolity and every bit of detail is pertinent. And if you think you’ve got this one figured out in the first chapter, here’s a spoiler: you don’t.

Summer, Spring, Fall and Snow are the Four Seasons, a group of friends knit as tightly together as the hours are knit into their days. The Best Summer of Our Lives focuses on the summer of 1977, the one between high school graduation and their freshman year at Florida State, the one they had planned to be the best summer of their lives. It is also the last summer these girls spent together and twenty years later they find themselves back in Tumbleweed, Oklahoma trying to figure out how to regain what was lost that year. Because if they can fix that, maybe they can also each find a way forward. Rachel Hauck threads together the individuals who make up this group and those who love them to deliver a perfect poolside read that will stick with you long after the last page.

The Best Summer of Our Lives by Rachel Hauck is available now from your favorite local bookseller or online:

Baker Book House        Christian Book            Barnes & Noble            Amazon

(This is where you usually see a disclaimer, because I often post reviews of books I have received from the author and/or publisher in exchange for an honest review. There is actually no need for a disclaimer here, because I bought this one and decided to review it because it brings me joy to share great books with you and to help promote and encourage these authors who work so hard to deliver quality literature.)