Why You'll Love This
A best-friend's-brother romance set on Prince Edward Island that makes the forbidden feel genuinely earned, not just convenient.
- Great if you want: summer romance with real friendship stakes and coastal atmosphere
- The experience: breezy but emotionally charged — PEI setting does heavy lifting
- The writing: Fortune writes longing well: restrained, specific, and quietly aching
- Skip if: you're tired of the forbidden-romance setup played straight
About This Book
Some promises are made to be broken. Lucy first meets Felix on Prince Edward Island — a stranger, a night she tells herself means nothing, a vow never to repeat it. The problem is that Felix turns out to be her best friend's younger brother, which means he isn't a stranger she can forget. He's a fixture, showing up every summer she returns to PEI for salt air, fresh oysters, and the kind of friendship that feels like home. The tension between what Lucy wants and what she's allowed to want gives this novel its real pulse — it's less about whether they'll end up together and more about why she keeps choosing the easier, safer version of her own life.
Fortune writes with a warm, unhurried confidence that suits the setting perfectly. Prince Edward Island isn't just backdrop here — it's atmosphere, rhythm, a whole argument for slowing down. The novel unfolds across multiple summers, and that structure does quiet, effective work: returning to the same place with the same people reveals how much — and how little — everyone has changed. Fortune has a sharp eye for the specific details that make fictional people feel real, and her prose carries genuine emotional intelligence without ever tipping into sentimentality.
