Name: Summer Dreaming
ISBN: 9780990884828

Liz Matis

Summer Dreaming: Hot in the Hampton Series

Summer Dreaming

Angela Guilherme

*I received this book from the author in exchange for an honest review*

Summer Dreaming is the first in a series focused on three very different friends, but all dealing with the beginning of adulthood. Kelsey, Leigh and Storme met in college and became best friends. Now that they've graduated, and before having to deal with the uncertainties of the future, they've decided to spend the Summer at Storme's family house at the Hamptons.

The protagonist of this first novella is Kelsey Mitchell, and hers is a very uncertain future... Still mourning the recent death of her father, Kelsey is in a dilemma: on the one hand she knows the right thing to do is to return home, get a job and help her family (she was only able to attend college due to an athletic scholarship) but what she really wanted was to continue her studies in Europe, only there aren't volleyball scholarships for MBAs...

Kelsey meets Sean Dempsey when she goes to the supermarket to do Storme a favor (in what originates a very funny scene). As soon as he sees Kelsey, Sean is immediately smitten with her and follows her into the supermarket, hoping to strike up a conversation. Sean is a local and has worked as a lifeguard for many Summers now. But this is going to be his last one, since Sean has enlisted at the army and is starting recruit at the end of the Summer.

The attraction between them is immediate and intense and they decide to spend the Summer together. But what will happen at the end of the Summer when they realize their Summer affair has become so much more? And how will Kelsey deal with having feelings for a military man knowing what her mother and her and her sisters went through with her father?

This was the first book of Liz Matis I've read, but it won't be the last. I love her sense of humor, her attention to details and the discreet way in which she weaved in the story some of the details of the next novellas. And I simply loved Kelsey and Sean! It's not always easy to make believable a relationship that develops in a short period of time, and it's even harder when it's a novella, but the author does it in an irrepressible way. So, so good!