Summer-y Titles of 10 Books

Happy Tuesday y’all! This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl theme is from another book blogger. Ellie over at Curiosity Killed the Bookworm has given us the theme of Book Covers That Feel Like Summer. I just happened to do that last summer, which you can check out here. Since I didn’t want to duplicate that, I am sharing Summer-y Titles of 10 Books.

What are summer-y titles, you may ask? Well, these titles all contain the work summer. This list is a mix of books I have read and ones on my TBR. So let’s check out these summer-y titles! Titles link to Goodreads.

Hurricane Summer by Asha Bromfield

Tilla has spent her entire life trying to make her father love her. But every six months, he leaves their family and returns to his true home: the island of Jamaica.

When Tilla’s mother tells her she’ll be spending the summer on the island, Tilla dreads the idea of seeing him again but longs to discover what life in Jamaica has always held for him.

In an unexpected turn of events, Tilla is forced to face the storm that unravels in her own life as she learns about the dark secrets that lie beyond the veil of paradise—all in the midst of an impending hurricane.

Summer Days and Summer Nights: Twelve Love Stories by Stephanie Perkins

Maybe it’s the long, lazy days, or maybe it’s the heat making everyone a little bit crazy. Whatever the reason, summer is the perfect time for love to bloom. Summer Days & Summer Nights: Twelve Love Stories, written by twelve bestselling young adult writers and edited by the international bestselling author Stephanie Perkins, will have you dreaming of sunset strolls by the lake. So set out your beach chair and grab your sunglasses. You have twelve reasons this summer to soak up the sun and fall in love.

Head, scales, tongue, tail / Leigh Bardugo —
The end of love / Nina LaCour —
Last stand at the Cinegore / Libba Bray —
Sick pleasure / Francesca Lia Block —
In ninety minutes, turn north / Stephanie Perkins —
Souvenirs / Tim Federle —
Inertia / Veronica Roth —
Love is the last resort / Jon Skovron —
Good luck and farewell / Brandy Colbert —
Brand new attraction / Cassandra Clare —
A thousand ways this could all go wrong / Jennifer E. Smith —
The map of tiny perfect things / Lev Grossman

Those Summer Nights by Laura Silverman

Hannah used to be all about focus, back before she shattered her ankle and her Olympic dreams in one bad soccer play. These days, she’s all about distraction—anything to keep the painful memories of her recent past at bay, including the string of bad decisions that landed her at boarding school for a year.

Enter Bonanza, the local entertainment multiplex and site of Hanna’s summer employment. With its mini-golf course, bowling alley, and arcade—not to mention her hot, flirty coworker Patrick—Bonanza seems like the perfect way to stay distracted. Until her boss announces the annual Bonanza tournament, a staff competition that brings her past Olympic nightmares crashing back into her present.

On top of that, the Bonanza staff includes Brie, the ex-best friend she cut off last year, and Ethan, her brother’s best friend who became unreasonably attractive in her year away and who accepts her, even knowing her worst secrets. Under the neon lights of Bonanza, Hannah must decide whether she can find a way to discover a new self in the midst of her old life.

Summertime Guests: A Novel by Wendy Francis

THE SEAFARER IS THE PLACE TO SEE AND BE SEEN IN THE SUMMER…

The glamorous Boston hotel is no stranger to drama with its rich history and famous guests. But the bustle at the iconic property reaches new heights one weekend in mid-June when someone falls tragically to her death, the event rippling through the lives of four very different people. 

Bride-to-be Riley is at the hotel to plan her wedding. She would have preferred a smaller, more intimate celebration, but her bossy mother-in-law has taken charge, and her fiancé hasn’t seemed to notice. Jean-Paul, the hotel’s manager, is struggling to keep his marriage and new family afloat, but now he must devote all his energy to this latest scandal at work. Claire, recently widowed, comes to town to connect with a long-lost love, but has too much changed in the last thirty years? And then there’s Jason, whose romantic getaway with his girlfriend has not exactly gone the way he’d hoped and instead has him facing questions he can’t bring himself to answer.

Over three sun-drenched days, as the truth about the woman who died—and the secret she was hiding—is uncovered, these four strangers become linked in the most unexpected of ways. Together, they might find the strength they need to turn their lives around.

A Midsummer Night’s Scheme by Harper Kincaid

All the world’s a stage, but it may be curtains for bookbinder Quinn Victoria Caine if she can’t bring the lights down on an actor’s killer.

Chad Hurt is Vienna, Virginia’s Local Boy Made Good. Back in the day, Chad was mostly known for breaking female hearts, but now he’s a big-time Broadway actor. Now, he’s back in Vienna, onstage on the Town Green, to announce the glitzy new theater he’s about to build in town. But after the announcement, as he gets in his car to leave, he’s killed by a sackful of snakes someone’s stashed in the back seat.

Chad’s only mourner is his blue Burmese kitten, Cindy Clawford. She wanders into the quaint Prose & Scones bookshop and strikes up a friendship with the resident German shepherd, Ruff Barker Ginsburg. So RBG’s dog-mom, bookbinder Quinn Victoria Caine, feels compelled to search for Chad’s killer.

Blood and revenge are hammering in someone’s head, but whose? Is the culprit one of the scores of women done wrong? Could it be Quinn’s fireman brother, Bash, who was Chad’s main competitor for town Lothario? When Bash becomes a target–black widow spiders tucked into his clothes–Quinn and RBG (with Cindy riding on his back) set aside their Hamlet-esque indecision and spring into action. But the only evidence is a scrap of paper bearing a vengeful Shakespeare quote. Can Quinn track down the one who seeks a pound of flesh, or will she face the sleep of death?

That Summer by Lauren Willig

2009: When Julia Conley hears that she has inherited a house outside London from an unknown great-aunt, she assumes it’s a joke. She hasn’t been back to England since the car crash that killed her mother when she was six, an event she remembers only in her nightmares. But when she arrives at Herne Hill to sort through the house–with the help of her cousin Natasha and sexy antiques dealer Nicholas–bits of memory start coming back. And then, she discovers a pre-Raphaelite painting hidden behind the false back of an old wardrobe, and a window onto the house’s shrouded history begins to open.

1849: Imogen Grantham has spent nearly a decade trapped in a loveless marriage to a much older man, Arthur. The one bright spot in her life is her step-daughter, Evie, a high-spirited sixteen-year-old who is the closest thing to a child Imogen hopes to have. But everything changes when three young painters come to see Arthur’s collection of medieval artifacts, including Gavin Thorne, a quiet man with the unsettling ability to read Imogen better than anyone ever has. When Arthur hires Gavin to paint her portrait, none of them can guess what the hands of fate have set in motion.

The Sword of Summer by Rick Riordan

Magnus Chase has always been a troubled kid. Since his mother’s mysterious death, he’s lived alone on the streets of Boston, surviving by his wits, keeping one step ahead of the police and the truant officers.

One day, he’s tracked down by an uncle he’s never met—a man his mother claimed was dangerous. His uncle tells him an impossible secret: Magnus is the son of a Norse god.

The Viking myths are true. The gods of Asgard are preparing for war. Trolls, giants, and worse monsters are stirring for doomsday. To prevent Ragnarok, Magnus must search the Nine Worlds for a weapon that has been lost for thousands of years.

When an attack by fire giants forces him to choose between his own safety and the lives of hundreds of innocents, Magnus makes a fatal decision.

Sometimes, the only way to start a new life is to die.

Summer Hours at the Robbers Library by Sue Halpern

People are drawn to libraries for all kinds of reasons. Most come for the books themselves; some come to borrow companionship. For head librarian Kit, the public library in Riverton, New Hampshire, offers what she craves most: peace. Here, no one expects Kit to talk about the calamitous events that catapulted her out of what she thought was a settled, suburban life. She can simply submerge herself in her beloved books and try to forget her problems.

But that changes when fifteen-year-old, home-schooled Sunny gets arrested for shoplifting a dictionary. The judge throws the book at Sunny—literally—assigning her to do community service at the library for the summer. Bright, curious, and eager to connect with someone other than her off-the-grid hippie parents, Sunny coaxes Kit out of her self-imposed isolation. They’re joined by Rusty, a Wall Street high-flyer suddenly crashed to earth.

In this little library that has become the heart of this small town, Kit, Sunny, and Rusty are drawn to each other and a cast of other offbeat regulars. As they come to terms with how their lives have unraveled, they discover how they might knit them together again and finally reclaim their stories.

Every Summer After by Carley Fortune

They say you can never go home again, and for Persephone Fraser, ever since she made the biggest mistake of her life a decade ago, that has felt too true. Instead of glittering summers on the lakeshore of her childhood, she spends them in a stylish apartment in the city, going out with friends, and keeping everyone a safe distance from her heart.

Until she receives the call that sends her racing back to Barry’s Bay and into the orbit of Sam Florek—the man she never thought she’d have to live without.

For six summers, through hazy afternoons on the water and warm summer nights working in his family’s restaurant and curling up together with books—medical textbooks for him and work-in-progress horror short stories for her—Percy and Sam had been inseparable. Eventually, that friendship turned into something breathtakingly more before it fell spectacularly apart.

When Percy returns to the lake for Sam’s mother’s funeral, their connection is as undeniable as it had always been. But until Percy can confront the decisions she made and the years she’s spent punishing herself for them, they’ll never know whether their love might be bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past.

Elvis, Me, and the Lemonade Stand Summer by Leslie Gentile

It’s the summer of 1978, and most people think Elvis Presley has been dead for a year. But not eleven-year-old Truly Bateman – because she knows Elvis is alive and well and living in the Eagle Shores Trailer Park. Maybe no one ever thought to look for him on an Indigenous reserve on Vancouver Island.

It’s a busy summer for Truly. Though her mother is less of a mother than she ought to be and spends her time drinking and smoking and working through new boyfriends, Truly is determined to raise as much money for herself as she can through her lemonade stand. And to prove that her cool new neighbor is the one and only King of Rock’ n’ Roll. And when she can’t find motherly support in her own home, she finds sanctuary with Andy El, the Salish woman who runs the trailer park.

That is Summer-y Titles of 10 Books that I’ve come across. Have you read any of these? What books have you read with Summer-y Titles?

Looking for some more ideas to read? Check out my monthly reading wrap-ups and bookish lists.