Review: Meet Me at the Lake by Carley Fortune

Meet Me at the Lake by Carley Fortune
Contemporary Romance
May 2, 2023
Berkley

Review by Jen

I was so excited to get an ARC of the latest book by Carley Fortune. I absolutely adored Every Summer After. And this book had the same second chance romance swoony summer vibes.

Meet Me at the Lake features Fern Brookbanks and Will Baxter. Fern grew up the child of a single mother living at a good old fashioned Dirty Dancing style lake resort in Canada, owned by her family. Will grew up with a younger sister, an artist mom who left him to live in France and a difficult father.

Fern doesn’t want to inherit and run the resort. She longs for the big city and has a dream of owning a coffee shop. While working at a coffee shop (not hers), she meets Will. He’s been commissioned to paint a mural on the shop’s wall. Fern stays with him in the closed shop all day and they get to be friends. Flirty friends. Who both have significant others. Fern’s long time boyfriend is back at the lake. After the mural is done, Will invites Fern to spend a day with him exploring Toronto, touring his favorite spots. They clearly have a strong connection, great chemistry. At the end of the day, they promise to meet a year later at the dock at Fern’s lake resort.

Fast forward many years. Fern’s mother dies in a terrible car crash and Fern leaves Toronto to go home and figure out what to do with the resort, nurse her wounds and think about her future. As fate would have it, Will shows up at the resort. He’s still impossibly good looking, in a suit, no longer a starving artist type guy, and surprise(!!!) he’s checking in for an extended stay. Fern learns that her mother hired him as a consultant to help turn the resort around.

I loved both of these characters. Fern so clearly held the resort close to her heart, yet wanted so desperately to experience a new life. She struggled with how her mother died, how she never got the chance to say so many things and experience more of their relationship. It felt very relatable to me. Mother daughter relationships can be rocky, and theirs was no exception. Just when they were figuring it out again, her mom was gone. Towards the end of the book, Fern reads through her mom’s diary. There are entries around her dating and finding out she was pregnant, her joy and worries. Side note- I wish I had a diary for my daughter to read some day!

Will. Oh Will… Let me say this right off, he’s so VERRRY sexy. There’s one scene. Fanning myself…wow.

Will has a secret. Will also holds himself to a much higher standard than he should. Both of these things implode at one point and it’s heartbreaking. Without giving too much away, he wanted to be an artist. He was a great artist. But instead, he did the mature thing and ignored following his passion to take a somewhat corporate and lucrative gig. When Fern sees him after so many years, she has a tough time reconciling the Will of today with the one she spent one magical day with long ago.

One more note. Dirty Dancing will always be one of my favorite movies of all time! The references to this movie were perfect. And I want to live at an old fashioned lakeside resort, too.