Book Review: The Summer Girl

I love The Avalon Bay seres by Elle Kennedy and the third book in the series came out this summer – The Summer Girl. I loved Good Girl Complex and Bad Girl Reputation which focused on the Hartley brothers – Cooper and Evan. The Summer Girl is about Tate Bartlett, the Hartley’s friend, and Cassie Soul.

Tate is a sailing instructor at the Yacht Club and also works at his family’s boat dealership. He loves being on the water. Cassie’s family is wealthy and were the former owners of the Beacon Hotel – the hotel that Mac bought and started renovating in Good Girl Complex and then hired Gen in Bad Girl Reputation to manage.

While Cassie was born in Avalon Bay, she moved to Boston when she was young (I think 10?) when her parents divorced. Her maternal grandmother and former hotel owner still lives in town and so does her father, stepmother, and twin half-sisters. She arrives in Avalon Bay to stay with her grandmother for the summer until the grand re-opening of the hotel at the end of the summer. But Cassie has another mission for this summer besides just spending time with her family. She wants a summer fling.

When she meets Tate, she thinks he’s the best looking guy she’s ever seen in real life and on top of that he’s really nice. But Tate is known as a big flirt and player, although no one will ever say anything bad about him – he may hook up with a lot of girls but he’s a good guy and respectful. Tate is wildly attracted to Cassie too, but he decides to friend zone her, afraid that he’ll end up breaking her heart even though Cassie says she only wants something physical. Tate becomes her wingman and almost instantly regrets it.

This book was so good! I loved it and can’t decide if it’s tied for my favorite Avalon Bay book with Good Girl Complex or not. I loved Tate and Cassie so much and the evolution of their strangers to friends to lovers was really good. They were both really good characters. They were the kind of characters that I just loved from start to finish and never got annoyed with or anything. I also appreciated that there were no annoying friends in this book. You know how some books have that one friend who is annoying or actually kind of toxic? There wasn’t any of that which was refreshing. I, of course, loved the appearances by Cooper, Mac, Evan, and Gen!

I’ve seen a couple posts on social media that mentioned this being the last Avalon Bay book, but I haven’t seen Elle Kennedy post anything saying that so I’m holding out hope that she’s got more Avalon Bay books planned!

Read this if you want a seaside, strangers to friends to lovers, spicy romance.