The Reading Lounge: Family Dramas With Summer Vibes 🏖️

Complicated family dynamics combined with a summer setting made these backlist books perfect reading for the plane, beach, pool, or patio

Even if you’re not a seasonal reader like me, there’s something wonderful about sinking into a comfy chair on a hot summer day and getting lost in a really great book. I personally love to read near water, but a shaded spot on my patio has been prime reading time for me lately.

One of my favorite sub genres to read in the summer is family dramas. The messier the better. And if the story takes place in a coastal location (think family vacations, family homes on the coast etc) even better.

There’s something quite compelling about being a fly on the wall when families get together. The unique ways everyone’s psychology and behaviors play out, the often combustable mixing of emotions¹, desires, and feelings all make for riveting storylines. I think there’s an infinite number of ways family dramas can play out in a story.

Some of my favorite complicated family dynamics are: parents and adult children reuniting or having to spend time in close quarters while underlying tensions simmer, spouses or significant others having problems, sibling rivalries, weddings and all the drama those can contain, when outsiders enter the family dynamics and cause chaos…truly the list can be unlimited!

Today I’m sharing five of my favorite family dramas that have summer vibes. All of these stories take place in, on, or near the sea and involve families trying—and often failing—to understand each other, get along, and/or just survive or overcome something.

Family Dramas With Summer Vibes

**All of these are books I loved and rated 4 stars and above

1. The Unsinkable Greta James by Jennifer Smith

   Just after the sudden death of her mother - her most devoted fan - and weeks before the launch of her high-stakes second album, Greta James falls apart on stage. Months later, Greta - still heartbroken and very much adrift - reluctantly agrees to accompany Conrad (her father who she has a very complicated relationship with) on the Alaskan cruise her parents had booked to celebrate their fortieth anniversary. Drama, old resentments, possible new love, and more ensue.

   I LOVED the Alaskan setting and the fact that the whole story took place on the cruise ship (with excursions). Great side characters. I found Greta and her father to be realistic characters. This was a nice mix of serious and light. If you enjoy music I think you’d especially love this

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2. The Wedding by Dorothy West

   The setting is the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's Black bourgeoisie on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1950s.
   
   Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society," we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could have chosen from "a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions." Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York.

   Above is all you need to know because that is the perfect set up for the inherent drama that can and does ensue. This is much more than just a wedding with drama and when a certain man with an agenda was introduced, I couldn’t stop listening to find out what would happen- would Shelby change her mind? Would the wedding be a disaster? Would grandma continue saying things that made everyone silently fume? From the beginning, the author set the tone perfectly and then continued to provide moments of tension, drama, moments of humor, and brilliant explorations of race and class. And then….. there came a moment in the story when my jaw literally dropped and I gasped. I have

   Sara Hildreth
   to thank for this very memorable rec!!

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3. Ocean State by Stewart O’Nan

   Set in a working-class town on the Rhode Island coast, this is a crushing, beautifully written, and profoundly compelling novel about sisters, mothers, and daughters, and the terrible things love makes us do. This family drama centers around the murder of a high school student and the fall out that occurs within a family when one daughter is accused

   The structure of this story created such a compelling narrative. I also loved that one of the perspectives—Marie the younger sister—is told from a time in the future. If you enjoy literary fiction with a side of mystery I think you’ll like this

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4. Tomorrow There Will Be Sun by Dana Reinhardt

   Two families arrive in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. A private Mexican villa is the backdrop to this smart, absorbing story of a milestone vacation in a tropical paradise gone wrong, wrong, wrong

   This was family drama combined with friend drama combined with parenting drama all wrapped up with a beautiful setting a villa as the backdrop. This story surprised me along the way. I didn’t like many of the characters, but I did find them hard to look away from

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5. Until August by Gabriel García Márquez

   A moving tale of female desire and abandon. Sitting alone beside the languorous blue waters of the lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach contemplates the men at the hotel bar. She has been happily married for twenty-seven years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover.

   One theme I especially love reading is women in midlife and beyond taking charge of their lives and living life on their own terms. This story, with writing and a setting that evoked summer, felt at times slow and sensual, but then would shift to a more frenetic type of pace. I was fascinated by Ana and had to know more about her motivations as well as what would happen to her by the end.

   

What family dramas with summer vibes have you loved?

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Even More Summer Vibes Book Recommendations

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1. especially if they’re hidden emotions