Just for the Summer
2024
Justin believes he’s cursed: every woman he dates ends up finding her soulmate right after they break up, and thanks to a viral Reddit thread, the whole internet knows it. Emma, a traveling nurse convinced she has the exact same curse, DMs him, and the two hatch a plan to date each other on the theory that their curses will cancel out and clear the way for them both to find real love elsewhere. Emma takes a nursing assignment near Justin so the two of them can date in person, and she and her best friend, Maddy, rent a cottage together on a private island on Lake Minnetonka for the summer. But what’s supposed to be a short fling gets complicated fast: Emma’s mother resurfaces and Justin unexpectedly has to take guardianship of his three younger siblings, forcing them both to navigate a lot more than they’d bargained for, including feelings that turn out to be real.
Having loved Yours Truly, I found this one worked from the same winning formula, and it delivered just as hard. The dynamic between Emma and Justin is wholesome in a way that snuck up on me, and the way Jimenez threads family wounds and past trauma into the romance had me tearing up through most of the second half, sometimes from pure swoony joy and sometimes because my heart broke for what each of them had been through. The mental health representation is handled with the same care I loved in Yours Truly, and the meet-cute and comic relief are both classic Jimenez. Books like this are a good reminder of why I love romance in the first place: it’s not always the most dramatic love stories that stick with you, it’s the human ones, and Emma and Justin are about as human as it gets.
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