I am not sure why I keep setting myself up for romantic failure. I admit that I am a hopeless romantic, but my personal experiences have definitely skewed the way I look at romantic love. There’s a certain type of romance that hits just right for me. I am more The Paper Palace than This Summer Will Be Different.

In Paige Toon’s novel Seven Summers, Liv returns to her home in St. Agnes, Cornwall after finishing her degree in sculpting at Edinburgh College of Art, and a brief stint studying the masters in Florence.

Her parents are delighted to have her home, as is her older brother Michael, who has Down Syndrome. Liv has a plan. She is hoping to make enough money to move to London, but she hasn’t quite figured out how to tell her parents.

At a local bar, The Seaglass, she reunites with her best friends, Amy and Rach. Their high school friend Dan’s band is playing there, and Liv is immediately drawn to the new singer, Finn. Apparently, he was also a classmate, but “The Finn we went to school with as really shy. […] This Finn is next-level hot….”

Liv and Finn are drawn to each other as is the way of these things. The problem is that Finn doesn’t live in St. Agnes anymore; he relocated to Los Angeles to live with his father after the death of his mother. He is only home for the summer to visit with his younger half-brothers and help out Dan’s band. (He’s got his own musical aspirations State-side.) And, of course, Liv’s life is in flux, too. That’s not going to prevent them from developing feelings for each other. But as we all know, the course of true love never runs smoothly.

Seven Summers follows Liv and Finn over the course of, well, I’m sure you’ll have figured it out, seven summers. But those summers are in the past when the novel begins. Things are slightly different for Liv in the present. She’s still in St. Agnes, working at The Seaglass and managing some holiday properties, and that’s where she meets Tom, he of the broad shoulders and “a very, very solid facial structure” which I take to mean he is attractive. Liv develops feelings for Tom which are reciprocated.

So, the question is how does Liv get from Finn to Tom. Well, I’ll leave that for you to discover.

I did not want to hurl this book across the room when I was done, and so that’s a compliment to Toon. Yes, I found the characters young, but then again that’s not going to be a problem for the majority of readers. My biggest problem with this book was the “have your cake and eat it too” denouement. Some people will absolutely eat it up and there is nothing wrong with that, obviously. I guess I am just a little bit too old to believe in the romantic fantasy of happily-ever-after. I found it all to be a little over-the-top.

For those of you who like low-spice, characters who are nice to each other, and an all’s well that ends well conclusion – you could do far worse than Seven Summers.