My Summer Reading List: For the Girls Who Read in Sunlight and Cry in Secret

There's a specific kind of book that belongs to summer. Not a beach read in the pejorative sense — not disposable fluff you skim between naps.

The real summer book. The one you carry everywhere and open in parking lots and read past the point where the light is good. The one that does something to you.

I've been keeping this list for a while. These are the books I want to press into people's hands when they're looking for a summer romance with real feelings in it — coastal light and yearning and maybe a little devastation woven into the joy of it.

Here's what I'm recommending.

1. Happy Place by Emily Henry

Emily Henry understands something essential about adulthood: sometimes the hardest thing in the world is admitting you've outgrown the version of yourself everyone else expects you to be. Happy Place is a summer romance wrapped around questions of identity, friendship, ambition, and whether love can survive change. The longing in this book arrives quietly and then all at once. Read it somewhere warm enough that the air itself feels nostalgic.

2. Party of Two by Jasmine Guillory

One of the things I love most about Jasmine Guillory's romances is that her heroines are allowed to remain fully themselves. Ambitious. Complicated. Certain about the lives they've built. Party of Two gives us a romance between two people trying to figure out whether love can fit into lives that already exist in full. It's warm and intelligent and deeply adult in a way contemporary romance doesn't always allow itself to be.

3. Saltwater Between Us by Jade Black

I'll be honest with you: I wrote this book because I was looking for something like it and couldn't find it.

Cerys Duncan is a woman who chose freedom with both hands — a solo sailing adventure, the open ocean, the kind of life that doesn't fit neatly into anyone else's expectations. When she meets Liam on a breathtaking island paradise, what develops between them is real and warm and inconvenient in all the best ways. But when he asks her to stay, she has to decide what love is allowed to cost.

This is a romance for women who love fiercely but refuse to disappear into it. For girls who dream about leaving everything behind and sailing away. For anyone who's ever felt the pull between what you want and who you are.

It's also, admittedly, a book about sunburnt yearning, turquoise water, emotional damage, and kissing someone while pretending you absolutely have your life together.

4. Float Plan by Trish Doller

I had to include this one because it feels spiritually adjacent to Saltwater Between Us in a way that makes me genuinely emotional. Sailing, grief, healing, self-discovery, the ocean functioning as both setting and metaphor. The romance unfolds with the slow inevitability of tidewater. This is the kind of travel romance that understands movement itself can transform a person. Read this one if you want salt air and second chances.

5. The Paradise Problem by Christina Lauren

After all that yearning, we deserve a little chaos.

Christina Lauren excels at writing romances that feel sparkling and escapist without sacrificing emotional sincerity underneath the fun. Tropical settings, forced proximity, sharp chemistry, family drama, and feelings that become wildly inconvenient at exactly the wrong time. The Paradise Problem is playful in the best way: a summer romance with enough emotional grounding to make the ending land beautifully.

If You Want to Go Deeper

For the readers who came here already knowing they want something slower, more literary, or emotionally sharper:

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi

Grief, desire, art, beauty, hunger. Akwaeke Emezi writes with breathtaking emotional intensity. This book feels luminous and dangerous in equal measure.

Love & Other Words by Christina Lauren

Quieter and more emotionally precise than some of their other work. A beautifully executed second-chance romance built on memory, timing, and the unbearable tenderness of first love.

This Could Be Us by Kennedy Ryan

Kennedy Ryan writes contemporary romance with enormous emotional intelligence and specificity. Her heroines feel fully lived-in. This is romance that takes rebuilding a life seriously.

Before I Let Go by Kennedy Ryan

One of the best contemporary romances I've read in years. Deeply emotional, deeply human, and written with extraordinary care. Not an easy read. Absolutely worth it.

Whatever you pick up this summer — I hope it's the kind of book that makes you late for things. That you read in parking lots and under questionable lighting and in the five minutes before you have to be somewhere else. That's what I'm always chasing. That's what I try to write.

Happy reading.

— Jade Black

P.S. Saltwater Between Us is available now. And Everything After — Book One of The Element of Everything series — is getting very close to its cover reveal. ☀️