My first kiss happened just before I turned 15. His name was Michael. We went to junior high together but didn’t date until high school. His family had moved to a neighboring town, so we ended up at different schools and weren’t able to see each other a lot.

That summer, he worked in the stables of a local horse track. He let me ride one of the horses 🐎 (just walking through the stables) and showed me how he could make a horse pee by whistling (no, I’m not kidding). I remember being out shopping with his mom once, and she introduced me to someone as her adopted daughter. Her friend shushed her and said she wasn’t supposed to say that I was adopted. She laughed and said I was Michael’s girlfriend.

He was the first kiss. It wasn’t passionate. We were standing and talking along the side of my house, and he just leaned down to kiss me. It was short and sweet and memorable. I don’t think anyone forgets their first kiss.

I had plenty of boyfriends in the 21 years between Michael and Dennis. Plenty of kisses. But after the first kiss, the only other really memorable kiss was Dennis…my last first kiss. I flew to New York to meet him in person, and he picked me up at the airport. He kissed me before we even pulled away. Five weeks later, we were married. 💖

Darius Rucker wrote a song called “History in the Making” where he talks about how “this could be our last first kiss.” I had never thought about it that way until I heard that song. You only get one chance at a first kiss, but you never know which one will be your last.

That’s true of most of life’s key moments. One of the things we thought about after Dennis passed was the number of special moments we didn’t realize would be his last—last birthday, last Christmas, last vacation…last kiss. 💔

I don’t plan to have another first kiss. I have been told I’m still young, and I never say never, but I can’t imagine anyone filling Dennis’s void. I can’t imagine not being surrounded by all of our memories or leaving the house he found for us to make into a home.

We met online 20 years ago. I don’t remember the exact date, but I know it was January because we talked about the Super Bowl party I hosted every year and was preparing for. Now that I think about it, it was my last Super Bowl party because Dennis and I were married by the following year, and he hated football. I was lucky to get him to even watch the Super Bowl with me and had to explain “downs” to him every single year. 🤣

I finished a book recently about a woman who goes back to her hometown for her 40th high school reunion, knowing she will have to face her high school sweetheart. I wouldn’t mind running into Michael again. It would be nice to catch up. But the real person I would want to run into again would be my last first kiss. It’s only been about a year and a half, not 40 years, but it would be nice to catch up. 💏

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Book Review

⭐⭐⭐
3 Stars for An Invincible Summer by Mariah Stewart

373 pages
Publisher: Montlake
Publication Date: May 1, 2021
This title was an Amazon First Reads selection.

Publisher’s Description

It was a lifetime ago that recently widowed Maggie Flynn was in Wyndham Beach. Now, on the occasion of her 40th high school reunion, she returns to her hometown on the Massachusetts coast, picking up right where she left off with dear friends Lydia and Emma. But seeing Brett Crawford again stirs other emotions. Once, they were the town’s golden couple destined for one another. He shared Maggie’s dreams—and eventually, a shattering secret that drove them apart.

Buying her old family home and resettling in Wyndham Beach means a chance to start over for Maggie and her two daughters, but it also means facing her rekindled feelings for her first love and finally confronting—and embracing—the past in ways she never thought possible. Maggie won’t be alone. With her family and friends around her, she can weather this stormy turning point in her life and open her heart to the future. As for that dream shared and lost years ago? If Maggie can forgive herself, it still might come true.

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Main Characters:

• Maggie Flynn – recently widowed, CEO of her late husband’s law firm, left Wyndham Beach after high school harboring a secret she kept from her best friends Liddy and Emma, reconnecting at their 40th reunion
• Grace Flynn – Maggie’s oldest daughter, a lawyer who just split up with her husband, works at her late father’s law firm
• Natalie Flynn – Maggie’s youngest daughter, a teacher and single mom to Daisy
• Liddy Bryant – still lives in Wyndham Beach, artsy, a bit of a hippie, her teenage daughter recently committed suicide and her husband subsequently abandoned her
• Emma Dean – still lives in Wyndham Beach, also widowed, extremely proper and always put together; supported her son’s career choice even when his father didn’t
• Chris Dean – Emma’s son, lead for an internationally known rock band called DEAN, but still a small-town kid at heart
• Brett Crawford – Maggie’s high school sweetheart, former professional football player, father of three girls from three marriages since Maggie left

I picked up Mariah Stewart’s An Invincible Summer as an Amazon First Reads selection last April. I was looking for something light, and this definitely fit the bill. Based on the description, it tells the story of Maggie Flynn—recently widowed, returning to her hometown for her 40th reunion, faced with seeing her high school sweetheart, and being reminded of a terrible secret she never revealed to anyone but was serious enough that it made her leave her hometown and never go back.

The book is well-written and descriptive, and I really did like most of the characters. We get the sense that this is one of those small towns where everyone knows everyone, so it’s hard to believe that no one knew Maggie’s secret. The characters are well-developed. This is the first in a series, and it sets the stage really well for upcoming books. (Goodbye Again, Liddy’s story, releases February 8, 2022.) But that’s actually one of the big reasons I gave it only three stars.

This is clearly the first in a series, and I didn’t feel like there was a point to it except to introduce all the characters. Maybe that was the author’s intent, but it was kind of a letdown for me. There’s a reason that the Star Wars franchise actually started with Episode 4—because the first three episodes were kind of boring in comparison. 😏

This is supposed to be Maggie’s story of later in life romance, but we get very little of Maggie’s love story and so much about the other characters that it really feels like it was written just to set up the rest of the series. I’ve read a lot of series that work characters in to the main story line. I would have rather seen more of Maggie with mentions of the other characters, but I’m pretty sure I already know the love interests for all of the main characters going forward. The author could literally write a whole other book about Maggie’s current love story because we don’t even get the beginning of it until 90% of the book is finished.

What further knocked it down to a 3 (making it ok, maybe I’ll pick up the next one if I’m looking for a light read) were some situations where I had a hard time with overall believability, character challenges, and timeline challenges. Let’s start with believability. The story begins with a 40th reunion weekend, and the focus is on Maggie connecting with her two oldest and dearest friends. However, the conversation centers around all the latest town gossip and all the changes in town. It sounds like Maggie hasn’t talked with Emma or Liddy in quite a few years, and we know from the description that she hasn’t been home in a long time. But then as the story progresses, they are thick as thieves as if Maggie never left Wyndham Beach. I also had a hard time buying the fact that 40 years later, Maggie has never ever shared the big secret that drove her away from home. (Some details in the timeline challenges and spoilers below.)

Character challenges…Maggie’s daughters (especially Grace) are incredibly juvenile in their interactions with Maggie, and I mean whiny juvenile. Grace is supposedly a successful lawyer at her late father’s law firm, but she makes some major errors in judgment that just make her look pathetic and, quite frankly, pretty dumb. When she discovers Maggie’s secret, she throws a tantrum and acts like a whiny teenager/toddler. Natalie is a teacher and a single mom—educated, self-sufficient, protecting and caring for a daughter of her own—yet she becomes an accusatory witch-with-a-B 😁 when she discovers Maggie’s secret. At one point, she even slams her glass down on a table and stomps up the stairs after Maggie tells her to go upstairs and get her sister.

At the same time, Maggie seems to coddle them and is extremely involved for a mother with children 29 and 32 years old. In fact, in one section of the story, it is mentioned that Maggie has some ideas of what Grace’s next move should be and hopes to steer her in the right direction. She’s 32. She can certainly ask Maggie for guidance, for her opinion, but Maggie really shouldn’t be steering her anywhere at this point in her life.

One other thing I struggled to comprehend was the number of significant losses this small circle of people have suffered. Emma and Maggie were both young widows. Liddy was divorced after her teenage daughter committed suicide. Another character had lost his wife and his parents to “last year’s pandemic,” but no one in Wyndham Beach seemed to be impacted by the pandemic.

As other reviewers pointed out, there was no reason to even include that since there is no reference to masks, social distancing, vaccines, anything else related to the pandemic anywhere else in the book. It would have been easy enough to leave the wife and parents out or have them killed in a freak accident. Again, if this truly is the setup for the rest of the series, I understand that you need characters to be unattached. Some of them could just be single, never married, but it seems like an awful lot of loss in a small group of people.

Now for the biggest challenge I had…the timeline, and it’s from a couple of perspectives. The first and the easiest thing that would help the timeline would be to include months as headings for the chapters because there were some gaps in time that weren’t hard to figure out but would have been easier with the month marked at the beginning of each chapter. Also, the title of the book is An Invincible SUMMER, but the story begins in late September. We don’t get to the summer (actually May) until about 57% through. So the book covers seven months in just over the first half but then only about six to eight weeks in the last 43% because the book ends Fourth of July weekend.

***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***

The other piece is the timeline surrounding Maggie’s lifelong secret. We’re told that Maggie got pregnant during prom her senior year, so when all of her friends were going off to college, she went to a relative’s cabin somewhere outside of Wyndham Beach until she had the baby and gave him up for adoption at the insistence of her parents and Brett. Let’s assume that was in the January timeframe and she started college a semester late. She went through four years of college still dating Brett, even though she was resentful about the adoption. She mentions that she left Brett 34 years before this story takes place, which means six years after they graduated high school, which assumes at least a year and a half after she graduated college. She and Brett had moved to Seattle and were planning their wedding when she decided she couldn’t marry him. By that point, Joe (their son) would have been just over five years old.

Don’t get me wrong, the timeline definitely works. It was another three years before Maggie had Grace. But because the clues were so scattered throughout the story, the reader has to do some serious mental gymnastics to figure out that the timeline works. I was convinced that there was something off until I outlined it for the review. For a story like this one, I don’t want to work that hard.

And the fact that Maggie actually stayed with Brett for those six years, harboring all that resentment, doesn’t ring true. I feel like she would have cut and run sooner—maybe not right away but certainly not six years later. Honestly, I thought the secret was that Maggie had an abortion and Brett found out later or that Brett cheated and got someone else pregnant and Maggie found out later. It didn’t make sense to me that she was with him six years after graduation with a secret she didn’t share with her very best friends.

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