BOOK REVIEW: Our Deadly Summer by Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen

Laura and Dee haven’t spoken since the day they buried a body together.

It was supposed to be the best summer of their lives. A break from university, from parents, from wasting their time on Irish boys with farmer’s tans. They’d imagined flirting with Ryan Phillippe on a New York rooftop. Instead, with summer jobs waitressing at a country club on Long Island, pickings are slim.

Mikey is a bully. Marco is off limits. Jose is angry. Mr Haight is a sleaze. Josh is too keen. And Other Josh… he’s something else entirely. It’s a miracle only one of them ends up dead. Dee is pretty sure she didn’t mean to kill him. Laura, to her credit, never asked. Not until she sends an email, out of the blue, more than twenty years later. It’s finally time to mend the biggest heartbreak of that summer; Laura wants her best friend back.

Have you ever said you’d help your best friend bury a body? Yeah, me too. But what happens afterwards.

Our Deadly Summer is a love letter to friendship and sisterhood wrapped in a layered tale of secrets and dead boys. It spans two decades, straddling the summer Josh died and twenty-four years later when our best friends collide again after so long apart. We see that fateful night before walking down memory lane into Dee and Laura’s history, and I could almost feel the sepia-filter, sunny nostalgia in my bones.

For me though, it felt very start-stop, and by the time we’d reached the present again I almost forgot what book I was reading. Even though the writing style might not have worked for me personally, the characters were absolutely the stars of the show. They were so real, so funny, so beautifully flawed — from their hot mess twenties to their adult lives acting like they know what they’re doing.

It’s less of a murder mystery with secrets and intrigue and more of a coming of age story about friendship with an unfortunate chapter.

⭐⭐⭐

Our Deadly Summer releases May 21st with Bloomsbury Publishing. I received a reviewers copy of this title.
Contains upsetting content including coercion, sexual assault, violence and death.

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