I’ve been living my busiest and most outdoor summer ever, involving reading many books on a dock by a lake or in a hammock in the woods, so I’ve decided to shout out some teen sapphic books that have that classic summer feeling to them!
A Scatter of Light by Malinda Lo
Written by the same author as Last Night at the Telegraph Club, A Scatter of Light is a kind-of sequel set sixty years later during one summer in California, which our main character Aria is spending with her grandmother mostly against her will. She’d rather be at Martha’s Vineyard like usual. But as the hot days go by, she meets her grandmother’s gardener Steph, who introduces her to a kind of life she hadn’t realized she wanted to live, one that will change her life forever.
Rise to the Sun by Leah Johnson
To all the music festival fans out there, this one is for you. Set during one weekend at a music festival at the end of summer, Olivia and Toni are there for different reasons. Olivia wants a crush-free fun time with her best friend after yet another breakup, while Toni is there to try to follow in her father’s musical footsteps in the hopes that she’ll be able to figure out what she wants to do with their life. The two of them meet, and over the course of the weekend find what they need in each other. (Content warning: gun violence.)
The Girl from the Sea by Lee Knox Ostertag
This graphic novel is near and dear to my heart, thanks to the beautiful setting of Nova Scotia’s South Shore being a place I’ve spent a lot of time. The Girl from the Sea is a salt-sprayed tale of a girl named Morgan trying to find her place in the world as she races to graduate high school, deal with her rambunctious brother and divorced mom, and try to figure out where she stands with her group of friends who don’t know that she likes girls. When she’s saved from drowning by a mysterious girl named Keltie, her summer turns around from being terrible to being one she can look forward to every, though Keltie has secrets of her own, and those secrets just might bring other truths to the surface whether Morgan is ready to face them or not.
And two more books that I read a long time ago and would be bad at summarizing but remember enjoying…
The Summer of Bitter and Sweet by Jen Ferguson and Cool for the Summer by Dahlia Adler
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