(courtesy Simon & Schuster)
If the festive season is all about love and renewal, then novels set in summer are all about the capacity of a time of sunshine, outdoors activity and time with friends and family in relaxed setting to recharge the soul and give you a brand new perspective on life.
In Australia, of course, these two seasons are one and the same, but in the England in which Best Summer Ever by Heidi Swain is set, summer sits a good four or so months from the depths of winter in which Christmas makes it magic happen, a sufficient separation of time that whatever didn’t magically fix itself at the most wonderful time of the year is now definitely in need of some love and attention.
Certainly when Daisy arrives back in the seaside town of Wynmouth, her childhood home where her parents are the head gardener and household manager at the nearby manor house presided over by ageing lord named Algy, short for Algernon – such is their tenure and Algy’s kind heart, that they are more family than employees with Daisy effectively playing the role of granddaughter – she is in desperate need of a fresh start.
Smarting from losing her job and finding out her boyfriend Lawrence is a cheating cad, in addition to being ambitiously materialistic in a way that does not sit easily with her, Daisy heads home hoping to find a way to get back in touch with the person she once was.
Both Dad and Mum were struggling with things I hadn’t known about and I felt doubly determined that while I was staying with them, I would be helpful rather than a thorn in their sides. If I could get to grips with working in the pub, help out around the cottage and keep an eye on Algy, the perhaps there was the potential for this to be the best summer ever, rather than a difficult one.
But who was that exactly?
Daisy isn’t quite sure though you get the sense that that is less a sense of forgetfulness and more a deliberate suppressing of a painful moment from her past which has rammed a schism into her relationship with her parents who clearly love her but with whom there is tension and an all-too-easy recourse to argument and anger over talking things productively and fruitfully over.
One thing Daisy is happy about is that she’s back in the same town as besties Nick and Penny, who aren’t a couple – YET – but who really should be, pub owner Sam, who gives her a much-needed summer job behind the bar, and of course, Algy, who clearly adores her and who keeps imploring her to go for a walk in the walled garden where the estate grows its flowers, and where, he believes, Daisy will find herself once again.
But Daisy is wholly resistant to that idea, for reasons not fully articulated until well into Best Summer Ever, and while she welcomes Algy’s interest in her life and care and concern for her, she cannot go back to the scene of the greatest moment of pain in her relatively young life.
One thing she is happy about is that she has met American tourist Josh, a handsome bronzed guitarist who has unaccountably washed up in a town not exactly known for being a magnet for international tourists.
While he’s only supposed to be a summer fling, it becomes very clear, very quickly that he is destined to be more than that.
But the big question remains – why is he in town at all?
Rather cleverly, Best Summer Ever answers any and all questions powering the narrative but not before giving us a heady dose of summer optimism and exciting possibility.
While Daisy has challenges aplenty – she is not a natural behind the bar, she keeps low-key clashing with her parents, and she can’t seem to escape her ex or the past trauma that lurks within the garden walls – she is also instrumental in helping her friends find purpose and love, the sea is gorgeously beautiful to swim in, as much therapy as it is refreshment, and has her heart healed by a fling that is far more than that if she’d only listen to her heart.
Full to the brim with an anticipatory sense that everything will change, and change markedly for the better this season, Best Summer Ever is a slow-building journey into what happens when someone who’s only looking to patch up the flaking walls of her crumbling life awakes to the idea that perhaps a wholesale rebuild is more what’s needed, and even more excitingly, eminently possible.
Radiating an endless sense of sunny possibility, Best Summer Ever is one of those romcom books which makes you feel like anything is possible because it grounds itself in the hard fabric of life and acknowledges that all for the summery hopefulness it embodies that making all that possibility come to fruition can be challenging indeed.
The only thing missing to make the night complete was Josh, but I tried not to mind too much, and when I finally waved my friends off and made my way up the stairs to my big, comfy new bed, I fell asleep contented, knowing my life had finally turned a very happy corner.
Sporting all the usual tropes and cliches of the genre, Best Summer Ever is that rare romcom that dives deep into the humanity of the people at its heart.
There’s still a lovely fairytale sense of renewal and healing at every turn, and honestly it does your ailing heart a power of good to soak in it, but Best Summer Ever never forgets that even when good things are in the offing, that real change is not simply a case of clicking your fingers and watching the magic fall happily into place.
Daisy has to work hard for her happiness, and like all of us, she makes terrible errors of judgement and acts rashly where a calm, thoughtful heart might work more in her favour, and it’s this realness that gives the novel a lovely buoyant sense of honest, heartfelt humanity.
At its heart though, Best Summer Ever is a bubbly lovely romcom full of hope and possibility, and throwing yourself into its summery depths is as refreshing as you know an ocean swim is for Daisy or Josh.
Full of secrets and pain, and a lavishly promising sense that these entrenched ills can be overcome in a way that will last well beyond summer, Swain’s latest novel is a joy and a delight, a journey into healing and renewal for a person who comes expecting them bare minimum and ends up getting far more than she ever expected in what is arguably the best, most restorative summer of her entire life.