'One Perfect Summer' Review

by Charhys Baldwin

One Perfect Summer by Paige Toon tells the story of Alice Simmons, an 18 year old girl on holiday with her mum in Dorset for six weeks. While there she meets a guy on the very first day she arrives, falling in love for the first time, and the story is about how their relationship grows. When something changes everything between them, Alice has to move on and get over her heartbreak and it shows her life progressing through university and beyond, but never fully getting over the loss of Joe. Then when she sees him again years later the story asks the question, do you ever really get over your first love?

The book is split into four parts, the summer they meet, six months later, seventeen months later and three and half years later. The first section is paced very well, with them meeting almost instantly; Toon progresses the story at a speed that fits the characters growing and developing relationship. This first section is full of the typical ‘summer romance’ scenes that lead the reader to think that they do have a future after the summer.  The rest of the story I believe becomes very rushed. Even after she has apparently moved on and started a new relationship, she is always focused on him. The whole journey seems to skip through large parts of her life and while it keeps the reader engaged, I found myself skipping sections to find out whether she had seen him again yet, because at the end of the day we all know she will, otherwise it wouldn’t be a story about their relationship. I think that the part where he does come back into her life is too short and should have occurred earlier in the timeline to give more of a justification to her actions in the rest of her life.

Their relationship starts out as a 'typical summer romance'

In every major part of her life she always reverts back to him and although this could be seen to be romantic she doesn’t attempt to contact him herself, and I believe if she was that caught up on him she wouldn’t have left it so long to try to contact him. In fact, it is shown she believes she has no way to contact him, with very little chance she’s just going to bump into him which in real life would make you think ‘I can’t wait around for a guy I have no idea where on earth he could be’. I do believe it is possible to have a relationship with someone else while still having feelings for someone in your past, but in her eyes it was highly unlikely they would ever meet again and so her reservations to fully move on even years into her relationship seems unrealistic.

Although some of the sub plot lines strengthened the story as a whole, some of the minor characters never really blended with the story. Lizzy the best friend is mentioned from the very first page but only occasionally pops up every so often and seems to have the worst luck in the world, from her mother having cancer meaning she can’t go to Dover with Alice, to her getting pregnant by her ex-boyfriend. Also looking at the third main character, Lukas, I think Toon was obviously trying to get the reader to sympathize with Alison’s choice to hold on to Joe, because even when Lukas tries to do the right thing Alison still won’t let him in and constantly compares him to Joe. It was quite clear when it came to Alice’s decision Toon hadn’t built on Lukas as a character enough for the reader to feel the dilemma that she is in and so to sympathize with Lukas.

Overall I think Toon wrote the first section brilliantly, it was fast paced and kept me guessing at what would happen to Alison and Joe, but after they parted I found myself struggling to read fully and became more interested in the short lived reunion. The characters of Alison and Joe I thought worked perfectly, but I struggled to appreciate the other characters throughout the story. I found some of the plot lines to be overly dramatic and not as much a love story, but more of what the reader would imagine in a fantasy, especially with the character of Lukas being the ‘rich and sweep you off to a huge estate’ guy. I also believe Toon did write a lovely ending but it could have been a bit more drawn out then it was, considering the length of the journey to that point of the story. This is lovely holiday read that doesn’t involve too much attention to the plot line, but if you’re looking for something that you can’t put down, this is not the book for you.