Steve Thomas: Kerri, welcome back to the show.
Kerri Maher: Thank you so much for having me back. I’m excited to be here.
Steve Thomas: The last time you were on the show was to talk about your previous book, All You Have To Do Is Call, which was another historical fiction. And at that time, you were still playing around with the title of your next book of maybe being Summer of Love. But now that it’s out in the world, can you remember where you were in late 2023 with the book, and did it end up being the book that you thought it was gonna be at that point?
Kerri Maher: Yeah. This is such an interesting question. So I started writing this book three summers ago. So it was three years ago was when I came up with the idea and really started to put it in motion, and that was right before All You Had To Do Is Call came out. It was crazy. So yeah, when people asked me when that book came out, “What are you working on?” I was working on Summer of Love, so here we are three years later.
The core story, the three main characters, the basic trajectory of their character development, all of that was pretty solid in my head by the time we talked three years ago. I am a writer who does a lot of revising, so there was a lot of tinkering and fine-tuning and I changed things here and there, but the core elements were the same.
Steve Thomas: And are you, I can’t remember from last time, are you an outliner or a pantser kind of person?
Kerri Maher: A pantser or a plotter? I love this question. So I am, in my life, a plotter. I love my lists. I like to feel prepared. But in writing, I am a pantser, which is a funny thing. You’re nodding like you totally get this. Is this, do you hear this a lot from people?
Steve Thomas: I was gonna say, that’s the exact same thing as the author whose episode is right before yours, Laura Sims, she said the exact same thing, that everything else in her life is completely plotted.
Kerri Maher: Yeah. It’s like the funny thing about the creative process, right? It gets to be different than everything else in your life. So I’ll say, there’s some caveats though here. For my first three historical novels, which were about real people, I was more of a plotter. I came up with these unwieldy Microsoft Word documents full of events and ideas for scenes, and they were always written out chronologically, even if the story wasn’t gonna be exactly chronological. So that was a little bit more of plotting, but with Summer of Love, it was pantsing. I knew where I was going but I really did not know how I was gonna get there. But to me, that’s just part of the fun of it is discovering… the book reveals itself to me as I’m writing it.
Steve Thomas: Before we get too much into it, can you introduce listeners to just the story of Summer of Love and the three women at the heart of it?
Kerri Maher: Yeah. So Summer of Love is a dual timeline novel. One timeline starts in the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco, all the famous things that we know of, the war protests, the concerts, the hippies, the Haight Ashbury, and the stars of that storyline are a sister pair named Winnie and Miranda. Miranda is trying to revitalize this vineyard up in Napa that she inherited when her father died, and it really is this very exciting moment for California wine, the ’60s and ’70s. And her sister meanwhile is living in the city, San Francisco, trying to be a poet. She’s reconnected with a high school boyfriend who’s an aspiring musician, so they are, like, really in that moment.
In the fast-forward, the other timeline, which stays in 2015, the starring character is named Dawn. She’s Miranda’s daughter. And this is not a spoiler, you know this from the first page, she has been struggling with her drinking. One of the things that she struggles most with is telling her mom, who has become this famous California vintner. She was one of the first to really make, California wine as we understand it today. She hardly drinks at all, actually. She really regards wine as an art and a science rather than something to drink. Unlike her daughter who is drinking it. And so there’s an interesting tension there.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And was the dual timeline always part of it?
Kerri Maher: From the get-go. Yeah, I knew it was gonna be like that from the start.
Steve Thomas: California itself feels like a character as well, and I know you grew up there. Was that something that you were wanting to explore, just the idea of California?
Kerri Maher: Yes. So before I had the fully formed idea for this book, I just had a bunch of random sort of things swirling around in my mind, and one of them was, “I wanna write a California novel.” I was born and raised in California by California native parents. I have now lived most of my life on the East Coast, although I’m trying to get back to California at some point. I have lots of friends there. I go there at least once a year. It’s really in my DNA. So I’ve wanted to write about it for some time, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to do it. I also wanted to write a road trip novel. I knew I wanted to have this sort of addiction recovery storyline. I knew I wanted it to have some kind of farm to table element to it. I just had all of these ideas, and they eventually came together in the form of these three characters who I just described.
Steve Thomas: And did you already know about the wine country and things like that, or was that something you had to…
Kerri Maher: No! So this is interesting. Because of the family I just described, my parents met at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. I was raised on stories about this time and place, and then I went to Berkeley myself in the ’90s, which was really not that long after. And the ’60s was very much alive in Berkeley in the ’90s, the peace signs, the war protests, the resistance posters, all that stuff was still happening. Alive and well. So I didn’t really need to research that piece. I needed to fact check it and I did do a little bit of reading.
What I really needed to research was the history of wine-making in California, and also some of the science of wine-making. I am not a super science girl, so I didn’t go all the way down the sort of science of wine-making rabbit hole. I just, I learned as much as I could to, I think, portray the process reasonably accurately.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And you can run it by people and say, “Does this sound right?”
Kerri Maher: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Steve Thomas: Did you have to torture yourself by making a trip to France or anything to research?
Kerri Maher: No. I had to torture myself with trips to France for my second and third novels, which the second one was about Grace Kelly, who, of course, lived in Monaco. And for The Paris Bookseller, which was based on the original Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, I spent an absolutely phenomenal week in Paris researching that. And then I’ve actually been back to Paris twice since the publication of that book. But I didn’t really need that for this book. There is, I don’t know, maybe a 10 or 15-page piece of this novel midway through that takes place in France. But I didn’t feel like I needed to go there for that piece.
Steve Thomas: I’ve read somewhere where you describe this book as your most personal novel. In what ways did writing it feel different from your previous novels?
Kerri Maher: Fiction writing is this alchemical process. And I think most fiction writers would say even if they’re writing about a character from the Middle Ages, they have something to give that character. There’s always some kind of personal resonance with that character. And this one, because it is set in California, and it was set in, we might say, my California. There are many Californias. But this is set in my California. So that is one level on which it was super personal to me.
So I just told you about my own history with the Bay Area. I didn’t grow up in Napa, but I grew up in an area adjacent to Napa called the San Joaquin Valley, so many fruits and vegetables are grown there. There’s also dairy and cattle and it’s a heartland of California. There is also a lesser-known wine country in the San Joaquin Valley, the Lodi wine country, and if anyone out there has ever drunk a Zinfandel, that is probably where it’s from, Lodi.
So I knew that I wanted to capture that aspect of California, and it just made sense to put it in Napa once I realized … I don’t know. Like I said, it all just gelled all at once when it all came together, and I was like, “Oh, a-ha, Napa. I’ll be able to write about all of this food moment in California through that lens.” So that was great.
I also, we’ve talked a little bit about addiction recovery in here, I am now four and a half years sober, so I got to give a lot of my experience of recovery to some of the characters in this book, and I really wanted to do that differently than I’ve seen it in other media. I didn’t want to harp too much on the struggle, but really show the joy of being alcohol-free and the amazing things that can come of that choice.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And congratulations on your four and a half years.
Kerri Maher: Thank you.
Steve Thomas: But yeah, like you said, that is an important element for a few characters in the book. What was your thinking behind wanting to look at the recovery part of it? Like, why did you wanna focus on that point of it?
Kerri Maher: I think I really wanted to focus on what comes after the decision to stop drinking, because usually we focus on what goes into the decision to stop drinking. And that is a well-worn path, so I really wanted to walk a different path in this book and really show the amazing things that can come as a result of the choice.
And, something we haven’t really mentioned is that Dawn has a very good friend named Audrey. Audrey has been Dawn’s best friend from college, and she’s been sober for eight years. And she’s very funny about it, I think. It was fun to write that character. She’s farther along than even I am now. But I’ve obviously met a lot of Audreys in my life, and so I got to put a lot of the wisdom that I’ve collected along the way into Audrey’s mouth, which was great to be able to do.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and Dawn and Audrey, part of their storyline is that they are investigating a mystery. I don’t know how much you wanna say about the mystery that they’re looking into?
Kerri Maher: Yeah, so every Dawn section, every 2015 section, actually starts with a little quote at the very top of the page from a series of children’s books called The Vineland Series. And when I say children’s books, Harry Potter-type books, and these books, The Vineland Books, have been written by an anonymous author, and when Dawn’s section opens, the final book of the series is about to come out. And Dawn, for work, winds up reading the first book in the series, and she reads it and she’s like, “This writer knows Hartley Vineyard. Who is this writer?” And so she and Audrey go on an adventure, this is where the road trip piece comes into play, to find the author of the Vineland series. Dawn has this suspicion that her mom might know something about this author, but Miranda is unusually quiet about it.
Steve Thomas: When you were coming up with that portion of it, you just have those little quotes, and there’s a couple things, quotes, throughout the book. Do you, in your head, know the whole story of Vineland?
Kerri Maher: Yeah. Oh, I got totally distracted from the original question. So yes. I could not sit down and write all eight books. I have a general sense of the overall arc of what those books are. I read the Harry Potter books and the Hunger Games books, and all of those books. And I love them. Most books like this kind of follow a similar “there is the one, and they have to…” So there’s a character named Phoebe in the Vineland books, who is the one, and she has to defeat, she has to vanquish a foe. These are well-worn paths, but they’re great, right? These are archetypal quest, journeys. So I had a great time coming up with the pieces of it I did come up with. And then, honestly, I love the challenge of conveying the whole messy tapestry of it in just a few quotes.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, ’cause you’re giving quotes throughout the series, but it also, of course, relates back to what’s happening in that chapter as well, so there’s thematic elements there.
Kerri Maher: Yep.
Steve Thomas: And we won’t say anything about who it is, but of course, that mystery is solved by the end of the book, so you do know. Yes.
Kerri Maher: Yes. We don’t leave you hanging.
Steve Thomas: Yes. Some books would leave you hanging, but you’re not that kind of writer. Oh. Thank you.
Kerri Maher: No, I’m definitely not that kind of a writer, no.
Steve Thomas: And The Summer of Love is its own image in the culture. Were you trying to present it in that way that people remember it and romanticize it, or trying to get more into the nitty-gritty of this was 1967 San Francisco?
Kerri Maher: Both. I think even people who lived through it now romanticize it. I see that with people in my family and also just pop culture, just seeing how the 1967 moment kind of gets portrayed. I think increasingly we see more, as more time has gone on, next year will be the 60th anniversary of that summer, we apply increasingly more critical lenses as we get further out from a time period, right? I think in the ’90s while I was going to college, it didn’t feel like a critical lens at all. It felt “wow, this thing happened here, and isn’t this amazing? And now we’re here. And let’s all celebrate!” Now I feel like we’re looking much more carefully at, why were they using so much Native American imagery, and what was that really about? And what were the prices people paid for this drug culture? Things like that.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And you get into that a little bit, you show some of the consequences, obviously. Like, I don’t think it would be a surprise to any of the readers that you had struggled with addiction as well, because it feels like you’re describing what it’s like to be high and drunk and whatever. And they’re having a good time, some of them. But then there’s the negative parts about it as well. But you’re describing the parts that are appealing about it. There’s a reason people get addicted to these things….
Kerri Maher: 100%.
Steve Thomas: Some of the characters, they have very high anxiety, and so something like marijuana can help bring that down. Almost all of them are using substances to get away from something else.
Kerri Maher: Yes. That is exactly right. Yeah. And most people who eventually stop, you do start because it’s fun, right? It’s not all bad from the get-go. It is for some people. I don’t want to say that’s true for everyone. For some people, it is bad from the get-go. But for many people it’s not. There’s a long honeymoon period, and for some people, it never takes the turn. But for those of us who it takes a turn, a darker turn, I think, it’s hard to look at that, right? And it’s hard to figure out why that happens and really reckon with that and ultimately kinda let it go.
Steve Thomas: And it’s an everyday ongoing thing. ‘Cause some stories go, “Yay, they decided to be sober. The end.”
Kerri Maher: No, that’s the beginning. That’s the beginning. And a lot of people say this is not my quote, but it’s like it’s the wine and alcohol is the only drug you have to justify not taking as an adult. It’s just so much a part of our culture. And some of what I really wanted to examine in this book, because California is seen, correctly, as like the epicenter of the good life: the beautiful sun-soaked patio with the amazing fruit and food and bottles of wine. Where did that come from?
Because prior to the mid-1970s, most people regarded California wine as swill, and that’s something that was fascinating to me in the history and I knew some of this from just growing up in California and people talking about it. But to really understand the struggle of the wine industry to convince the wine-drinking population of America in the ’60s that there was California wine that was just as good as French wine, was like a near impossible feat.
There’s the Judgment of Paris in 1976, which is in the novel, and this is not a big spoiler. This is I think, well-known historical fact. California wines are pitted against French in this blind taste test, and California wines triumph! The French are like appalled by this but that was the turning point. That was when the tide changed, when people in America are like, “Wait, what? This bottle costs $10 less than the French one I’ve been buying? Bring it on.”
Steve Thomas: And it tastes better.
Kerri Maher: Yeah! By the time I was drinking in the like early aughts, unfortunately, the California wine was more expensive than the French wine. I don’t understand quite the how that happened, but whatever.
Steve Thomas: Was there anything when you were doing your history, especially looking at the wine stuff, anything that history forced you to change in the novel, where you’re like, “Oh, I was gonna do this, but now I have to do that because it didn’t work out?” Or did it match up pretty well?
Kerri Maher: No. Not from the historical perspective. There were character things that I needed to change. But actually to talk about those would be very spoiler heavy, so I’ll just say… the things that I changed over the course of multiple drafts really had to do with character development and plot structure, which you know because you’ve read the book, that there’s a complex structure to the book. It’s not hard to read. It’s not difficult to read, but there’s some interesting things about the structure that I really had to figure out how to do that effectively.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. So in the ’60s you have Winnie and Miranda, and there’s chapters going back and forth covering one of their points of view. They experience things obviously a lot differently because they’re very similar, but they’re also a lot different. What made you interested in exploring that through the different sisters who are in the same family, but have built really different lives for themselves?
Kerri Maher: Yeah. I think there’s a few ways of looking at this. I think, one way is my whole career really has been about looking at complicated and interesting female relationships, and so this sister relationship is a permutation of that. And there is a kind of classic pairing to them: Miranda’s sort of the responsible one, and Winnie is the free-spirited one. And honestly, I did not set out to set it up that way. That was just the way it went down. But what’s interesting to me is the reasons why Winnie is this way and Miranda is that way, and there is a central trauma that is motivating to both of them in ways that neither of them really understand and are able to grapple with until they are much, much older.
And I was interested in that too because, I feel like this term intergenerational trauma has really leaped onto the scene in the last decade. And so I wanted to explore that in this family. What does that look like for this family? I’m always wary, for myself, of starting with ideas as opposed to characters, and this book did start actually with a collection of ideas rather than the characters, but I feel like I very quickly just glommed onto the characters. It wasn’t that I was like, “How is intergenerational trauma gonna be expressed by Winnie and Miranda?” It was more like, “Okay, what is the inciting event here and how does that affect these two women differently?” And how does that ripple to Dawn in the next generation, right? Like, how does that wind up affecting the next generation?
And, the other term that I love from the last few years has been cycle breakers, right? Who is the cycle breaker and how? Like, how are they breaking cycles? What does that look like? It can look different in the same family.
Steve Thomas: Are there any of the three women in the novel that you identify with the most, or are they all different facets of you?
Kerri Maher: They are definitely all different takes on different facets of me. The one I’m probably least like, which is ironic because she’s the writer, is Winnie. But there’s a lot of me in Winnie, nonetheless. I have a lot of things in common with Dawn. Dawn is the same age that I am. She’s struggling with a lot of the same things that I was struggling with at her age. So she’s personal to me in that way. I also really relate to Miranda, who has no drinking problem, none of that category of stuff. But she holds very tightly to the reins. So when we talk about being a pantser or a plotter, right? I’m a plotter in my life, just like Miranda. Miranda’s definitely a plotter. She is a wildly talented winemaker, clearly, but she’s also a visual artist. She’s a painter, and it drives Winnie crazy, the poet, that her sister won’t just paint for a living. Why don’t you just do that? And Miranda doesn’t want to. She wants to do this other, more secure thing that is family oriented, that feels safer to her. I really relate to a lot of that.
Steve Thomas: You mentioned earlier that the book reveals itself in the writing. Was there anything in Summer of Love that revealed itself to you that you hadn’t really thought of when you were considering the novel in the first place?
Kerri Maher: When I knew that the book was gonna be called Summer of Love, which I guess I did know three years ago, although I did flirt with other titles. My editor was like, “No, this is the title of the book. This is gonna be the title of the book.” I’m like, “Okay.” I knew that it was gonna be about love in many forms, but it really became about love in many forms. That word and the way I use it throughout the book, that was revealing to me.
And it was fun to watch that happen. I know it’s weird to say it that way, but there is an extent to which when you’re really deep into a book or a section of the book, you just feel like it’s coming from somewhere else and you’re writing it down. I am in charge of it, right? But there’s also this outside part of me that’s watching it happen. So watching the way that the word love and the emotion of love evolves for the characters and in the book was great.
Steve Thomas: I think probably because you’re a writer and you’ve written about writing and you’ve taught writing and part of the story I think is that stories can help preserve history, can even help with healing. Storytelling itself can be part of the recovery and reconciliation process. Was that something do you think that you intentionally put in there? Or is it just in there because you are a writer and you can’t help but think in that way?
Kerri Maher: I did intentionally put it in there, but it’s also true, like, when I look around at different recovery modalities, and when we use the word recovery now, I’m not just talking about from substance use. I’m talking about from various mental health issues, from abuse, and storytelling is a core component of recovery from anything. And that was just something that I had begun to notice around me. Maybe I was especially attuned to that because I’m a writer, but that was absolutely something that I wanted to show in the book is the foundational importance of storytelling to any type of meaningful recovery.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And I think this book continues, I think, what is a common theme for you as well is a network of care for women, like your last book was more about around abortion access, but then this book is the family, and previous books about real people and those lives. Is that also something that you are, again maybe it’s just what you’re drawn to write about, not just “women’s fiction,” quote unquote, but of that caring for each other as a group, feels like an important theme to you.
Kerri Maher: It is. And, I hadn’t really thought about this novel as like that, but thank you for showing that to me. You’re right … yeah, ‘
Steve Thomas: This time it’s the family that’s the network that’s together taking care of each other.
Kerri Maher: Yeah, exactly. And to some extent the friends, right? Audrey and the other close people. We haven’t even talked about Bernard, who’s not a woman, but he is, I have a gay uncle who was part of the gay scene in the ’60s, and when I told him about this book, he was like “You do have a gay character, right?” Bernard was, like, in the draft, but not a very big character, and he was like “He needs to be a bigger character because it would not be realistic otherwise.” And I was like, “Okay. Aye, aye, captain.” So I did make Bernard a bigger character. That was super fun.
Steve Thomas: Yes. And it’s fun to follow these characters. It starts in ’67, but it moves forward in time, and so you get to see them grow and explore various other things.
You also are generally writing historical fiction. Is history something that you’re always interested in exploring and now you get to do it through stories? Have you written anything contemporary or considered writing anything contemporary?
Kerri Maher: Yes. So I have actually five novels from before my first published novel that were never published, and all of those were contemporary. Actually, that’s not true. One of them was not contemporary, but they were mostly contemporary. So I’ve written a lot of contemporary. I would like to write more contemporary. The book that I’m currently working on, which I’m gonna say very little about because it’s evolving in my mind, let’s just say, is foundationally a contemporary novel with big historical elements. That’s all I’ll say about it.
But I have always loved history. I was an English major in college, but I also was an art history minor. And I loved the way in which art history, at least the way it was taught to me, used literature and history and the whole moment from which a painting, like from 1830 might emerge, right? A painting of the French Revolution. You had to really understand the moment from which it emerged to understand the painting itself, and I loved that. I loved p- putting those things together, and I feel like actually writing historical fiction is a similar type of putting lots of pieces together project, which is right up my alley.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And have you enjoyed being more away from… ’cause you’re you had a couple novels that were about, Grace Kelly, about actual people, where now you have fictional people in the real history. Does that make it easier not to have to, like Grace Kelly, you can’t have her just all of a sudden doing something that’s not Grace Kelly-ish?
Kerri Maher: It is easier and harder. So in one way, I found it very natural to me to have the real historical record and to imagine how Grace Kelly got from one thing to the next thing. It gave me a scaffolding that I did find very helpful. So with All You Have To Do Is Call, there was less scaffolding, and with this book, there was zero scaffolding. And I did sometimes feel like I was dangling from a windowsill, hanging on by my fingernails.
Steve Thomas: You mentioned, I think last time you were on, and you recently had one of your newsletters about audiobooks and how much you love audiobooks and you actually got to be involved recently with an audiobook production. Can you talk about that?
Kerri Maher: Yes. I am a huge audiobook listener, huge. Basically all of my pleasure reading takes place on audio because I can do it while I’m doing other things.
So the audiobook narrator for Summer of Love, is the same as it was for All You Have To Do Is Call and The Paris Bookseller. Her name is Lauryn Allman, and she and I have gotten to be friends mostly online. And so I said to her, I’m like, “We have this really interesting relationship. What if we had some bonus material in the form of a conversation between the two of us about our creative processes?” And she was up for it, and so was the producer of the audiobook, so we got to do it. So there’s this bonus conversation between me and my now longtime audiobook narrator about our processes and about our relationship. So I hope that audiobook listeners will enjoy that.
I also read the author’s note for Summer of Love, which I had not done before, and apparently, all I had to do was ask! And I got to go to a sound studio. It was very cool. It was very cool.
Steve Thomas: That is very cool. Yeah, I got to record the podcast a couple times in in a real studio, and it’s “Ooh, this is fancy-shmancy. Not just my dining room where I’ve got a laptop set up.” Does hearing your stories make you think about them differently? Do you hear Lauryn’s voice now when you’re writing?
Kerri Maher: No. I do not hear Lauryn’s voice when I’m writing. As much as I love Lauryn, I have never listened to any of my audiobooks from beginning to end. I dip in and listen to specific scenes, but the reason I love Lauryn so much is because, this really answers your question, she did The Paris Bookseller, which was the first book she had done of mine, and I was listening to it, and I just kept listening and listening, and I thought to myself “Wow, who wrote this book?” ‘ Cause she really did transform it for me. You know, the way that she did the voices of the different characters she brought it to life for me in a way that I was not anticipating and was just absolutely grateful for and impressed by. So that was the beginning of our relationship. I found her on Instagram and DM’d her, and I was like, “Thank you. This is amazing. Thank you for doing this.”
Steve Thomas: It’s great when you get paired up with a good narrator. And obviously I know you don’t get complete control of that, but I’m sure you could’ve said, “Oh, I hate this person. Never have her do my books again!”
Kerri Maher: Yes, they do give you a choice. They send you audition-type tapes and you get to make a choice. Authors do.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, ’cause audiobook narrators really are their own, they’re performers, and so they’re giving their own performance. It’s like if they optioned it for a movie and did it, that wouldn’t be your book either. It would be this director’s and actors’ version of your book. But your book is your book, and this is her interpretation of it, which obviously she does a good job interpreting it.
Kerri Maher: Yeah, she does. And this is something she talks about on the conversation, so I don’t wanna spoil that, but she talks about her history as an actor and her training. And how that brought her to audiobook narrating, and how it has served her as an audiobook narrator. And that was so interesting for me to learn about, too.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, that’s great, and that’s why I want real people to continue to do audiobooks, and I don’t wanna hear AI audiobooks.
Kerri Maher: No!
Steve Thomas: ‘Cause I want that performance. Like I understand to a point of if you’re doing like the books for the blind programs kind of things, that you’re trying to get things out of print and just really get them out there in the world, but if you can get it and get it done by an actual performer and things like that, get that done.
Kerri Maher: Yes. And I think increasingly, things like that will get written into book contracts. Sometimes it’s a fight, but…
Steve Thomas: Yeah. That could be a whole other conversation.
Kerri Maher: That is a whole other, no, we’re not gonna get into that.
Steve Thomas: But Kerri, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I enjoyed the book. I was in Florida visiting my parents and finished it up last week, and very much enjoyed it. It was a good beach read. I was in Destin.
Kerri Maher: Thank you.
Steve Thomas: Everybody go out. It’s available now. Buy a copy, borrow it from your library. Either one, that works. That gets the support back to Kerri, and obviously the audiobook is good, so get the audiobook, too.
Kerri Maher: Yes, for sure, 100%.
Steve Thomas: Thanks so much.
Kerri Maher: Thank you again.
*****
Monica Hoh: Hello, and welcome back to The Circ Desk. I’m Monica Hoh, a NoveList librarian who catalogs books utilizing our creative taxonomy to help listeners like you find your next great read.
Dawn Towery: And I’m Dawn Towery, a NoveList librarian who works on NextReads newsletters, curated lists in NoveList, and core collection selections.
Monica Hoh: Great. So we’ve just finished listening to Steve talk with Kerri Maher, so we wanted to share some readalike options for Summer of Love. Do you wanna go first, Dawn?
Dawn Towery: Thanks, Monica. So my first pick is Where the Girls Were by Kate Schatz which was actually just recently published back in March of 2026. This is a fiction debut by a nonfiction writer. It’s lyrical, coming-of-age novel that stars Baker, who’s the smartest girl at her school, and she wants to be a writer. She’s studious and dutiful, and she’s headed for Stanford. But it’s 1968 San Francisco, and she falls for a guy at a party, and she gets pregnant. Her mom’s hugely disappointed, she wants to hide this, and she sends Baker off to this home for pregnant girls and tells everybody else that Baker’s in Paris. And the story develops from there as Baker adjusts her life in this home for unwed young women. And I like this pairing with Summer of Love because both books explore friendship and secrets. But also the main thing I like is that they are set around the same time and place, and they follow two teenage girls who could have passed each other on the street or seen each other at a party or a concert.
And then my second pick is Definitely Better [Now] by Ava Robinson, which was published in December 2024. It’s a contemporary novel, has a rom-com setup, but then it moves deeper. A New Yorker, Emma, follows the rules of her Alcoholics Anonymous chapter, and so she hasn’t dated for a year. But then she finds herself attracted to the cute IT guy at work. But can she navigate a relationship at this point? She’s not sure, and she’s got family issues, especially with her father. So picking this book as a readalike is a little bit unconventional but I think both have a well-drawn setting. I feel like Summer of Love is very much sort of a California novel, and I feel like this one is very much a New York novel, but I feel like the main connection between both of the books is that each features a character who’s newly sober and adapting to that sort of big life change. So I feel like if readers enjoy Dawn’s story in Summer of Love, that they’ll definitely wanna check out Definitely Better Now and Emma’s story.
Monica Hoh: Oh, I love that.
Dawn Towery: Yeah, I think they both get at different elements that are intriguing from the book.
Monica Hoh: They definitely sound like they complement each other pretty well.
Dawn Towery: So those were my two suggestions. What are yours?
Monica Hoh: So when I was looking for read-alikes for Summer of Love, I actually went straight to our subject headings in NoveList and I was taking a look at the subject headings and appeal language to break down different aspects of the book that piqued my interest. I love stories about women, sisters, family relationships, and historical fiction, so I chose those and got to browsing on our product to see what titles contained similar concepts.
The first title that caught my eye was California Golden by Melanie Benjamin. This book came out in 2023, and it’s an atmospheric and character-driven historical novel that takes place in the 1960s. It’s about two sisters, both teenage girls, who are growing up in California. We follow them as they grapple with the unconventional path of their mother, a former swimmer and housewife turned talented female surfer who defies societal expectations. We follow these sisters as they find and lose their footing among the surfing subculture in California, deal with addiction and partner abuse, and how their choices split their paths as they grow up. We see also the search for reconciliation, one that is similar to Summer of Love and that gets explored in this title. I also chose this title for its similarity to Summer of Love with the focus on the sisters’ relationship with each other and how they’re doing their best to navigate this unconventional world that they live in.
The second title that I found was Meet Me in the Garden by Nina LaCour, which is actually about to be published this year in August, so just next month. It is inspired by the author’s own Creole family, but this historical novel is then set in the period of the 1940s to 1960s and follows a Creole family as they navigate grief, racism, and social expectations. While they start out in New Orleans, Louisiana, the family eventually chooses to move to California to get away from the racism that they’re experiencing, but they then find themselves caught up in secrets: one about passing for white and the other sister is dealing with the realization that she is attracted to women. So even though this is a bit of a departure, I was drawn in by the facets of this book, Meet Me in the Garden, that it shares with Summer of Love. Both are historical family sagas set in the 20th century in California, dealing with relationships, again, between sisters and family members, their secrets that alter their lives, and the ensuing decisions that they make, ones that drag them also apart and onto very different trajectories in life.
I also loved that there was a theme of estrangement and reconnection that carries the reader through all three of these stories, and I love seeing the different lenses through which these concepts could be explored whether that’s through the sisters themselves or their children that come after to pick up the pieces that their families left behind.
Dawn Towery: Yeah, that sounds fantastic.
Monica Hoh: I’m really looking forward to it as a book, put it on my TBR.
Dawn Towery: Yes. Yes, absolutely. I’ve got so many books to read from just poking around in NoveList, looking for readalike options. I was like, “Oh, I’m not sure that one would work for this, but I wanna read it, so let me put it on my list over here.”
Monica Hoh: Yep, yep, that’s the occupational hazard that we all deal with.
Dawn Towery: Yes. Yeah. 100%.
Monica Hoh: Yeah. So that is it for us from The Circ Desk. We will check you out next time.
Circulating Ideas 