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Each week Stephanie, Lillian and I will be featuring a SUMMER OF LOVE review on our blogs.  Or rather, we’re trying to.  Summer has gotten away from us, and we may have bitten off more than we can chew.  Regardless, don’t forget to check out Stephanie’s blog, Once Upon a Chapter, and Lillian’s blog, Mom With a Reading Problem, for their Summer of Love reviews.

Welcome to my tenth review for the SUMMER OF LOVE (10th on week 11 because I missed week 8)!  As I mentioned in week one, I actually already read a lot of contemporary romance, but there’s just something about summer reading that screams contemp for me.  And I’m using these 12 weeks to showcase books in different categories.  The tenth category is:

Young Adult

Honestly, summer just screams classic young adult contemporary to me.  So many of those big name YA contemp authors set their books in the summer, or come out with a book every summer, so that’s part of the reason why.  I’m not sure I can explain why otherwise, it’s just a mood thing I guess.

Recommendations:

• You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson
• I’ll Be the One by Lyla Lee
• Amelia Unabridged by Ashley Schumacher
• Eyes on Me by Rachel Harris
• When It’s Real by Erin Watt
• Rainbows and Raindrops by Kelley Lynn & Jenny S. Morris
• You Can’t Catch Me by Cassie Mae
• Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen
• The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen
• This is What Happy Looks Like by Jennifer E. Smith
• Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock
• My Life After Now by Jessica Verdi
• The Avery Shaw Experiment by Kelly Oram

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Title: Coming Up for Air
Author: Miranda Kenneally
Series: Hundred Oaks #8
Published by: Dreamscape Media LLC
Release Date: July 1, 2017
Format: Audiobook
Narrator: Carly Robins
Length: 6 hours and 48 minutes
Genres: Contemporary, Romance, Sports Romance, Young Adult, Coming of Age
Source: Chirp
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2021 Audiobook Challenge, Lenoreo's 2021 Backlist Reader Challenge, Lenoreo's 2021 COYER Summer
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ Google ✩ iTunes ✩ Libro.FM
My rating:

Blurb:

All of Maggie's focus and free time is spent swimming. She's not only striving to earn scholarships - she's training to qualify for the Olympics. It helps that her best friend, Levi, is also on the team and that he cheers her on, but he's already earned his Olympic tryout, so sometimes his presence creates more pressure.

If that wasn't stressful enough, life becomes even more complicated once Maggie goes on a college visit. There, she realizes how much of the typical high-school experience she's missed out on by being in the pool. Not one to shy away from a challenge, Maggie decides to try to squeeze the most out of her senior year while still training. First up? Making out with a guy. Maggie figures that Levi could be the perfect candidate - after all, they already spend a lot of time together. But as Maggie starts to discover her own feelings for Levi, she must decide how much she's willing to sacrifice in the water to win at love.

My Review:

4.5 stars — I haven’t read a book by Ms. Kenneally since that first one, Catching Jordan, YEARS ago.  I think I forgot what her writing was like, and how much I appreciated the way she wrote characters and their struggles.  There was just so much to love in Maggie’s story, and when I initially sat down to write this review, I was overwhelmed and couldn’t start.  We’ll see if things are better after a few days to absorb.

Let’s get narration out of the way first, I LOVE Ms. Robins’ voice for Maggie.  It felt young, she had a great consistent range of voices, and the emotions were fantastic.  Basically everything I love in a narrator, she nailed.  And she had just the right amount of sass and spunk and confusion and genuineness and caring.

Maggie was an interesting heroine to root for.  I will admit, I have barely anything in common with her, and yet I connected with her all the same.  She was driven, motivated, and passionate about swimming.  Her competitive drive is something I will never understand completely, but I at least felt it.  And while swimming took up most of her life, I still felt other elements of her personality.  You could feel how caring and empathetic she was towards her friends, and even those not as close.  I appreciated that she feels things deeply.  And she wasn’t without flaws by any means — I can’t tell you how frustrated I got with her refusing to listen to what her coach (and others) were trying to tell her.  At least she got there eventually.

This was a coming of age story in many ways, especially as it deals with Maggie dealing with her sexual awakening in some ways (that sounds so weird, but I don’t know how else to express it).  Even though it wasn’t what I remember experiencing way back then, I loved that we got to see her dealing with her hormones and lust and all that good stuff.  So often women/girls aren’t portrayed as wanting sex, and it really shouldn’t be something that is gendered.

I appreciated the way Maggie could get jealous, and she recognized those feelings, but it still didn’t always prevent her from feeling them.  I also liked that I felt like she genuinely didn’t know her own feelings, b/c feelings can be confusing.  Normally that would be something that drives me crazy, but Ms. Kenneally writes it in such a way that it feels authentic instead of just convenient.  Basically she deals with teenage feels really well.

And while much of it was her own personal story, the book was also strongly focused on her relationship with Levi and how it was changing.  Levi was wonderfully flawed, but still super adorable.  I really wanted them to find a way.  I loved the little things that made him up, how he shunned the spotlight, his love of reading, his confidence, his genuine love and caring for Maggie.  I particularly loved that he was a genuine dick at a certain point, but you FELT his real remorse afterwards.  Again, something that would be hard to come back from with other authors, but Ms. Kenneally makes it work.

And holy shit, when they started her “lessons”, things were super sexy between them!!  Like damn.  I loved that you could FEEL the friendship between them, but you could also see when things started to change, and that neither one of them had been looking for more or feeling those things before, so it kind of took them both by surprise.

I think one of the strengths of this book was the amazing cast of secondary characters.  They all felt necessary, and added something to Maggie and Levi’s story.  From their friends Georgia and Hunter, and the things they were each going through; to their families that actually played an important and supportive role (which is sometimes overlooked in other YAs) — huge shout out to Oma and Opa in particular, they were hilarious and delightful.  Even Coach Woods’ cameo was fun, which kind of makes me want to reread Catching Jordan but I don’t have time.  And honestly, even those with smaller roles felt important: Coach Josh, Jason and Susannah, Shelby, and even Roxie.

And lastly (because damn this review is getting way too long), the swimming aspect was beyond awesome.  I love when sports romance books actually have a lot of sports time.  As someone who did speed swimming when I was a kid (albeit not well), it brought back so many memories.

So yeah.  Wow.  Apparently I went from not being able to get my thoughts out to verbal diarrhea.  Whoops.  Needless to say I really enjoyed myself, and kind of want to dive into a few more of these.