Pleasant Bay by Emily Wakeman Cyr

NOTE: This book was an Advanced Copy Review (ARC) on Reedsy Discovery.

With its pink sands and sunset and bright blue ocean on the cover, Pleasant Bay comes across as your typical summer read, but it’s so much more than that. Sarah Harris is going to Cape Cod to try and forget about her father’s ALS or her brother’s deployment in Afghanistan, as well as make money to cover the cost of her senior year of college. Enter Luke, a good-looking baseball player with an Australian accent, who actually takes her mind off of all her troubles and what started out as a distraction ended up being real love. Fast forward seventeen years later where Madelyn is Sarah’s teenage daughter who desperately wants to know who her father is and wants her mother to stop being so overprotective. Can Pleasant Bay help them find happiness or are they doomed to suffer?

This story really surprised me, but in a good way. When I began reading Pleasant Bay, it gave off vibes of Sarah Dessen’s The Truth About Forever and I thought it would be a carbon copy of that. But I was glad to be proven wrong. As I read through Sarah and Madelyn’s lives, I saw both women grow and come into their own, whilst learning from their mistakes, and for Maddy, learning from her own and her mother’s mistakes. Truly an inspirational and insightful story.

READ FULL REVIEW AT Reedsy Discovery

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