Title: Feels Like Summer (Summer Storm #2)
Author: Six de los Reyes
Genre: Romance
Pages: 186
Year: 2017
Publisher: Indie
Source: Arc provided
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Synopsis:
Five-minute girlfriend. This is what Jett signs up for when she meets Adrian and his band Arabella at beach music festival Summer Storm. One kiss and the attraction is too electric to ignore, but Jett has no room for love and Adrian is Mr. Relationship who’s getting over his recent breakup. The solution? Keep it simple. Keep it casual. For three months (that’s the rule about breakups, right?), Jett helps Adrian move on and Adrian shows up on Jett’s bed whenever she wants.
Then the three months are up and neither of them are in a hurry to be the first to leave. Does Jett walk away from a potential disaster or does she finally let someone into her closely-guarded heart?
Reviewer’s Thoughts:
You can listen to this ‘History is All You Left Me’ inspired playlist on Spotify. See the tracklist in Tumblr.
Feels Like Summer is achingly swoony, relatable, and authentic. I was squealing and fangirling over it while reading. It was a wondrous experience. Once again, Six de los Reyes delivers. If you love a well-balanced romance with a trope, “everything is fun and games until someone fall in love vibes,” you’re looking at the right book.
The story follows Jett, who was roped into pretending to be the girlfriend of Arabella’s front man Adrian, for five minutes. It was one kiss that ignited it all. As a result, Jett and Adrian have decided to form a beneficial no-strings-attached relationship. The expiration is three months. You can expect steamy scenes and two people who’s trying their very best not to form an intimate attachment to each other.
Feels Like Summer is an instant reliever for me. It has the perfect background setting which is summer in the Philippines. (Mind you, the heat will kill heal you!) The ambiance will sweetly tug you and it’s accompanied by elegant compositions. Who can resist that? I also love de los Reyes’s rhymical writing.
However, it was the main character that speaks to me. Jett is similar to Rhys from de los Reyes’s debut novel, Just for the Record. They both have the sexy, mysterious, intimidating aura that flickers around them. The only difference is that Jett is candid and she’s not afraid to be forthright about how she operates, I admire that. She has made it into my favorite contemporary heroines. She’s daring and independent. Everyone wants to be half as good as her. I love her.
I can’t really talk about the romance without spoiling the whole arc of the book. Though, I really love that Feels Like Summer didn’t employ the usual romance ploy for f and m pairings. In this case, the female character is more in control and she’s not “clingy.” (There’s no bad connotation towards that word, js) I’m putting it out there: this is the steamiest romance book ever. I conceded.
For all my talk about not being the damsel in distress, it turns out I’m the one who has to snap out of the eternal loop of freaking out. That the truth is, I’m the one who’s afraid of losing myself by being with someone. That weird feelings bring out the weird in me.
But the damsel still saves herself in this story.
It’s rewarding to see Jett explicitly say she saved herself and romance didn’t complete her or made her feel any less broken. We need a gentle reminder every now and then. That’s incredibly important, given how a lot of non-romance readers tend to discredit the growth of female characters because they think romance comprises the character’s other qualities. I can manage to separate their journey to their significant others and I hope everyone could as well.
I’m just all heart eyes for this book. I love, love the fun tempo of the plot. There’s banter, friendship dynamics, and a hot otp. Props to de los Reyes because the ex-girlfriend made an appearance in the story. There was an apparent tension at the beginning, and it wasn’t handled in a misogynist way. However, the break up was crafted as a difference of circumstances which is quite similar to the plot-line of Songs of Our Break Up. I like that Jett also admitted that she could’ve been friends with the ex in another lifetime because she was very courageous for following her heart.
In addition, the heroine has an internet best-friend. Hooray! It was portrayed in a non-shallow way. I couldn’t ask for anything better in terms of prominent female friendship and characters on the page.
Lastly, there are several relevant issues embedded such as awkward firsts, men who are willing to admit their weaknesses, women having awful monthly menstruation. It’s not just cramping and bleeding for most, sometimes it can be more serious than that.
The icing on top is the pop culture reference of #romanceclass books. If you’re a fan of Playlist series by Jay E. Tria, then you’re going to love this book. You also would really want to read this for several reasons, like crossover. I won’t indulge more unless I’m at a gun point though, there’s a lot of screaming on my part. Feels like Summer easily became my favorite romance book of all time.
Review also posted at Goodreads and Amazon.
