Book Review: 'The Summer We Fell' by Elizabeth O'Roark

My Rating: 3/5

Genre: Contemporary romance

Books remaining in my physical TBR: 31

A second-chance forbidden romance between Juliet and Luke with a tragic story containing themes of sexual assault and death. A dual-timeline story with many mysteries and twists throughout, but is overall a heartwarming read with an ideal happy ending despite all of the moments which make you weep.

(Spoilers ahead)

For this review, I will continue to say ‘college’, meaning how the US calls university, not the UK.

This book contained adult themes & sensitive topics, and this review will be covering those, so this is a trigger warning, as this review will contain themes of accidental suicide, sexual assault and rape.


It's been a while since I read anything, but reading The Wedding People by Alison Espach really brought me out of my terrible reading slump, and I was able to read this book in 3 days! By no means is it the fastest I've ever read a book, but it's really helped in my catching up to my reading goal, and this book was actually much better than I thought it would be. As I said in my little summary, it's a dual-timeline book, which made sense whilst reading, but when I was making my notes after finishing it to try to make this review, it meant I was kind of getting confused over the timelines. I think in future, I'll have to start tabbing important events that happen that I want to talk about.

To start off: everyone in this book is unlikeable. Except Donna. I'll also explain who everyone is in the book in hopes of my review making more sense, as I tend to ramble.

• Juliet is our main character; this book is a single POV, so we only see what she has to say. She has a tragic past due to being sexually assaulted from 12 to 15 by her much older step-brother, and her mother said she was just making this up. She moves in with her boyfriend and his family at 15.
• Danny is Juliet's boyfriend from when she is 15 to when she is 18. He is dead in the present timeline, but we don't know why until towards the end.
• Luke is a boy Danny meets at college, and they become best friends. Danny brings him home with him over his first summer holidays so they can surf together. It's also learnt that he has a tough home life, with his mam having a habit of getting with alcoholic abusers.
• Donna is Danny's mother, and she fills the traditional role of a housewife in a very religious family. She is very caring but often oblivious to things which seem obvious to Juliet and others within the story. In the present timeline, she is expanding her home to foster as many children as she can to give them a better life, as she did with Juliet, but she is dying from cancer.
• The pastor is Danny's dad, and never given an explicit name (from what I remember). He fills the stereotypical husband who is always finding faults in what his wife and others are doing; he expects the women to do the work and is annoyed when they don't. He is also dead in the present story, which is a plot device in the 'then' plot.
• Grady is a boy who very clearly wants the job of the pastor, even making comments about taking over when it's inappropriate. He hates Juliet and is incredibly homophobic, which is ironic as later in the story, she catches him having sex with another of the boys on their trip to Malibu. It is later theorised he hated Juliet because he was in love with Danny, but was too religious to be able to accept himself and come out. 
• Summer is a girl who Luke was seen with at beach parties a few times over the summer; she is not the only one, but the only one who reappears in the present timeline.
• Libby is a girl that the group hangs out with in the 'then', is later Grady's girlfriend (yes, she is with him when Juliet finds him with another boy), and they are later married, where she is pregnant with his child in the present.
• Luke and Danny also have an assortment of friends I can't remember the names of; I think they were mainly introduced for future plot lines. The ones I can think of now are Caleb, Beck, Harrison, Ryan, and Liam. They each either don't have many or any important lines of dialogue.

I do really like the dual-timeline type of books; I think it was done well in The Gingerbread Bakery by Laurie Gilmore, but I found the present plot to be much more boring than the 'then' plot. I suppose the present did a good job of building mystery and having an interesting ending, but at the start, I didn't really care for Juliet and Luke. I didn't know why they hated each other, and I thought they were stupid - especially when they hated each other during the day but then were sneaking around to have sex in the night? It seemed very weird. To me, it seemed like a relationship built purely on lust, which didn't do a great job of making me really like them as a couple. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the drama of the book, but the present was a lot less interesting than the 'then'.

The only things that I can remember happening in the present are Juliet being a shit person to the people she knew as a teenager; lots of mentioning of drywall, painting, and gardening; and the build-up to a ball that lasted all of two short chapters. I felt as though the book made a massive build-up to Juliet being a horrible person in her past, and she really failed everyone around her, just for the reveal to be that Grady essentially blackmailed her into leaving everyone. Was she a horrible person in the book? Yeah, quite often, but so was everyone else. For example, she and Danny were at this college party, and it's mentioned a lot in the book how Juliet hates the fact that Danny wants to wait until marriage (as he previously explained to her), which would make sense considering that he is from a heavily religious household. But she pushes this and essentially assaults Danny, or at least reading it felt as though she were assaulting Danny and then immediately made herself the victim because he didn't want to do anything she considered 'adult' and in a proper relationship. Is there anything wrong with wanting to have these experiences with your partner? No, of course not! But it's wrong to push your partner into doing them, especially if they've made it very obvious in the past that it's something they don't want to do at all due to their beliefs. And that's fine if it's an important thing to you in a relationship; you don't have to stay with that person, but you don't assault them at parties to get your way. Danny is, rightfully, upset and runs inside the house at the party they're at (this happens in the garden for some reason?), so Juliet runs away like the attention seeker she is. In what world is it safe to walk 5 miles to your hotel in the middle of the night? I should have mentioned that she is there with Danny's parents, but they obviously don't go to the party with her and Danny. This leads to a whole rescue thing with Luke, because oh, he's such a hero! But then, to make things worse, Danny apologises to her for freaking out about the whole assault thing? What! This is because of Luke, and to me, it feels very reminiscent of when people try to downplay when people are assaulted (especially men to other men), and they imply that they should have liked it because they're partners, or because the assaulter was attractive. Which is just wrong. Assault is never something that is 'fine', even if the assaulter is conventionally attractive or because the victim reacts to what's happening in the situation (which is touched upon in the book).

But I'll be honest, you can't really feel sorry for Danny for long because he is just sort of an awful person; he is clearly a product of his environment within a heavily religious and conservative small town. There's a point in the book where he's visiting home again, and he and Juliet are on a walk around the town on his last night there. When they near their home, she brings up the fact that she is not a virgin to Danny, because whilst they've never explicitly discussed it in their two-year relationship, he'd just assumed it. This makes Danny freak out, until Juliet tells him about how she was raped in her past. You'd think: oh, surely as a good Christian man and decent person, he would comfort her and apologise for his reaction? Well, not really. He brings up something about it only happening once, and Juliet tells him it was a repeated assault, which is heartbreaking, even for a fictional character, as it's still something which occurs to people around the world. This is where Danny falsely says that she must have liked it because it kept happening and she didn't make an attempt to stop it. Which isn't even the worst part. When he finds out it's her step-brother - who is much, much older than them by at least a decade - he starts getting onto her about telling her mother. Her mother didn't believe her. And Danny then asks if it was happening when they were together, implying that her being raped by her step-brother was her cheating on Danny in her relationship. Can you see why nearly everyone in this story is horrible? Juliet assaults Danny; Danny downplays her assaults and blames it on her. At least Luke's crime is just that he's a shit friend and is seeking a relationship with Danny's girlfriend - and she actively cheats on him even when they get engaged.

Essentially, Danny's dad declines towards the end of the 'then' timeline, which puts Juliet in a tough spot because she was planning to end things with Danny so she could start a relationship with Luke - which was still a shit thing to do, but I would still say miles better than actively cheating. But eventually, Danny's dad passes away, and not long after, Danny proposes to Juliet, and she feels as though she has to say yes. I do feel as though Juliet was a tragic character, especially because she felt as though she owed this family due to the fact that they took her in for free. But I feel as though the author could have written her to be a much better character, and I have no idea why she decided to make the conflict of the book the fact that Juliet already had a boyfriend. 

Anyways, the climax of the 'then' comes when they vacation at one of their friends' beach houses, and it's a massive group of them, with even Grady being invited. Whilst they're staying in this beach house, it becomes a common nightly occurrence for Juliet and Luke to sneak out just to have sex. This relationship feels purely based on lust rather than love, but what do I know? At one point, they're in the open on the beach and discussing running away together or something like that (I could be remembering wrong), and they kiss each other. When Juliet heads back, she sees that Danny is sitting on the front porch, but she thinks he wouldn't have been able to see them in the dark. So she speaks to him as normal, and he immediately confronts her. They argue, and then Juliet heads upstairs. When she wakes at around 3am, she can't find Danny. So she goes looking for him, which is when she sees two people obviously having sex under a blanket, and she assumes it's just Danny moving on, which she's relieved about. But when she approaches with her flashlight, it's Ryan and Grady. She apologises and moves on, looking for Danny (Grady chases after her and says it wasn't what it looked like, and Juliet reminds him he's with Libby). She doesn't find him after searching for three hours, so she goes to Luke's room (shock horror) for help, and he decides to wake all of the friends up to help. When they get to the beach, they find Luke's best surfboard split in half and washing up near the shore. Danny had accidentally killed himself.

Earlier in the story, Luke was doing very dangerous jumps from a cliff and over rocks to surf onto waves, and Danny was clearly very jealous, saying anyone could do it if they were using Luke's surfboard since it was so nice and expensive - though Juliet thought this was untrue and it was only due to Luke's skill that he could do it. So it's surmised that after Danny found out about Juliet and Luke, he decided to try and do the same cliff jump Luke had attempted. Only it was dark, and the board ended up snapping, leading to his death. Not even like two pages after they find out Danny's died, Grady immediately goes over to blackmail Juliet; he says it looks as though Luke killed him, since he was using his board, and that he would tell the police that unless Juliet promised to leave their town, ignore Luke and everyone else, and never return. But this confuses me, as, as I mentioned, it's implied Grady was actually in love with Danny, but he clearly didn't grieve him much. It also turns out Grady was secretly campaigning for the church not to fund Danny's family to do a mission in Nicaragua just so he would stay in town. Very weird character.

I really have nothing to say about the present timeline as it's very bad. I didn't enjoy it at all. The only interesting bit is the ball or gala thing, which was there to raise money for Donna's new foster home/orphanage. First of all, Juliet's abusive ex-boyfriend, Cash, comes, and Luke immediately punches him. I didn't see the point in Cash, as he barely added anything to the story; it could have just been mentioned that she continued to enter abusive relationships or something? But then the police come because Grady has gone to tell the police that he thinks Luke and Juliet killed Danny, so they're arrested on suspicion of his murder. This doesn't end up working, and Donna essentially lies to free them. I don't know why she does it. Blah blah blah, happy ending despite them both being horrible. I rated it four stars, but I think I'm realising I hated it. But I kind of love how much I hated it? It was a bit like the Heartstopper Netflix series; I really enjoy how much I hate it. Probably like that thing with people and car crashes.