One Golden Summer

One Golden Summer is a friends-to-lovers romance story that explores the complications of developing intimate relationships. Alice and Charlie meet at difficult times. Alice is healing from a breakup and is trying to rediscover herself as an artist; her understanding of relationships is guided by past disappointments. Meanwhile, Charlie is facing medical concerns that have ignited his fear of dying at a young age. He doesn’t want to pursue a relationship he assumes he will not be around for. However, Alice and Charlie’s time together frees them from these emotional constraints.

Both Alice and Charlie begin the novel defining love in terms of fear. Alice has never found it easy to foster authentic connections with romantic partners. Her internal monologues about the potential of long-term relationships are harried, as their staccato rhythm underscores how few functional marriages she has personal knowledge of:

Over and over, I keep falling. Over and over, I keep getting my heart broken. Everlasting love may have existed for my grandmother’s generation, but I’m beginning to think it’s a modern myth. Heather’s divorced. My parents are, too. They pulled the plug on their marriage three years ago, right after the twins left home.