THE EDGE OF SUMMER

Romance and grief mingle over the course of a summer.

Coriander Cabot and her best friend, Ella Ridgewood, were always passionate about saving whales. In the wake of Ella’s tragic drowning, Cor is left to finish what the two of them started, and the first step is a summer marine biology internship on Cape Cod. It isn’t long before Cor meets Mannix Reilly, the sexy local lifeguard who leaves her head spinning and her heart thumping. Cor struggles to balance this new relationship against honoring the unfinished business of her old friendship and working toward her future ambitions. Tides turn, Cor gets flustered, and readers will struggle to engage with a narrative that has all the right pieces of the machinery but never quite aligns them properly to get things moving. Characters revolve around one another, but the narrative urgency never kicks in, and the cast members are not sufficiently developed to be compelling. Readers will yearn to empathize with Cor, but she doesn’t express herself in ways that will foster that deeper connection. Mannix is handsome, kind, and thoughtful but similarly underdeveloped; the pair never fully click, and instead they are just pushed together as the plot dictates. The teens are White.

A picturesque setting and intriguing premise that don’t quite coalesce.