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314: Romances for the Beach

Looking for a few romances to add to your summer reading list? In this episode, we’re sharing romances that would make great beach reads, with stories full of second chances, complicated friendships, family expectations, emotional depth, and plenty of momentum.


During our bookish check-in, Ashley shares Jessica Parra’s Rubi Ramos’s Recipe for Success (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm), a YA novel about baking, ambition, family pressure, and finding your own path. Jen shares June Hur’s The Forest of Stolen Girls (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm), a historical mystery set on Jeju Island in 1426.


Then we move into our main discussion with two summer romance recommendations: Alisha Rai’s Partners in Crime (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm) and Carley Fortune’s Our Perfect Storm (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm). We close with a round of Lit Chat about DNFing books, skipping to the end, and whether it ever feels okay to spoil yourself just a little.


We’d love to know what romances are on your summer TBR or which beach reads you think we should add to ours. Connect with us on Instagram or Facebook @unabridgedpod, and visit unabridgedpod.com to learn more about our buddy reads, newsletter, and ways to support the show.



Bookish Check-in

Ashley - Jessica Parra’s Rubi Ramos’s Recipe for Success (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Jen - June Hur’s The Forest of Stolen Girls (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)


Our recommendations

Ashley - Alisha Rai’s Partners in Crime (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Jen - Carley Fortune’s Our Perfect Storm (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)


(A note to our readers: click on the hashtags above to see our other blog posts with the same hashtag.)


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Full Transcript for Episode

[00:00:00] Ashley: Welcome to The Unabridged Podcast. I'm Ashley.

[00:00:05] Jen: And this is Jen.

[00:00:06] Ashley: Join us for bookish episodes and check out our website, unabridgedpod.com, where you can find lots of new bookish content to grow your TBR.

[00:00:13] Jen: Sign up for our newsletter to find out more about online book discussions and upcoming events. Find us on Patreon for extra Unabridged content.

[00:00:21] Join us on Instagram and Facebook at unabridgedpod and message us there or see our website to get plugged into the Unabridged community. You want opinions about books? We've got them.

[00:00:35] Hi, everyone, and welcome to Unabridged. This is episode three-fourteen, Romances for the Beach. So just as a reminder, before we get started, if you use bookshop.org to purchase any books, you both support independent bookstores, and you can help support us.

[00:00:52] If you go to bookshop.org/shop/unabridgedpod, anything that you purchase will help us out and also, again, help out your favorite independent bookstore. So we would love for you to use that. We also link the books that we talk about during our episodes to particular affiliate links.

[00:01:10] So thanks so much for supporting us. All right, we're going to start with our bookish check-in. Ashley, what are you reading?

[00:01:16] Ashley: One of the books I am reading is Jessica Parra's Rubi Ramos's Recipe for Success. I'm listening to this one thanks to LibroFM, and this one is a lot of fun. It would be a great one for a beach read, actually. And it focuses on Rubi, who is going to graduate from high school very soon, and she is a Cuban American student, and her parents have a very successful bakery, and they actually have, like, two locations at this point and are doing really well.

[00:01:50] And yet you get a sense right from the beginning that her parents, who fled Cuba, came to the US, are really wanting a different path for Rubi. So Rubi absolutely loves baking and is really into it, but she is also extremely studious, hardworking, and her family wants to help her go to law school. And so kind of everything in her life revolves around how to move her toward that trajectory, and her parents, though they know that she loves baking, have tried, especially her mom, has tried to deter her from devoting all of her time and energy toward her family's bakery because they really want her to be able to have this, like, what they foresee as an easier, more successful future that will be, like, less friction than the one that they have had.

[00:02:38] And so Rubi is working on a lot of different directions to try to make that happen. So she's on this debate team. She's the captain. They have this kind of group of girls, all of whom are trying to get into the Ivy League schools, and all of them have this way of supporting each other, and also some of them are really cutthroat and cruel, and there's kind of this undercurrent of privilege and opportunity given to people in privilege.

[00:03:06] And so Rubi is feeling like she's really having to fight her way into this group, and then also, of course, feel some resentment for the not-so-great parts of that community.

[00:03:18] parts of So she's working on the debate team. She's trying to get that going. Math is kind of her weak area, and so she is trying to improve in that and winds up with a tutor.

[00:03:30] And the tutor is this lovely guy, Ryan, who is a math genius. And she is getting to know him, and you're seeing some little romance sparks happening there. And so, that's developing. And then she finds out in her community that there is a bake-off competition. And so she feels this pull toward the bake-off, even though she's essentially been banned from baking, basically, especially in this final part of her high school career, that she can be on the track for, all the opportunities she wants to have at college.

[00:04:04] So I don't wanna spoil anything. I love the tension in the book, I think it's really well-developed, and I think that we see Rubi as somebody who's so kind and so full of ambition and opportunity, and yet also very relatable, so that it's like you can't put all of your energy in every direction. And so then what does that look like when you're not able to do that?

[00:04:27] And what does that mean? There are a lot of kinds of mishaps in communication that lead to some secrets that are all pretty heavy, and at the same time very understandable in how they develop and how she kind of lets them continue to fester in the way that secrets sometimes do.

[00:04:43] So yeah, I just am loving it. I think it's a really compelling story about what it looks like to try to find your own path, to love your family, to be second generation, to want to take opportunities that you know your family wants you to have, but also to try to find your own way. So again, that's Jessica Parra's Rubi Ramos's Recipe for Success, and I am really enjoying it.

[00:05:06] Jen: Oh, that sounds so good. I will definitely add that to my list. That's not on my radar at all.

[00:05:10] Ashley: I think it is a great summer read for sure. Jen, what about you? What are you reading?

[00:05:14] Jen: What are you reading? So we are recording a little early, as you, Ashley, know, and I am reading June Hur's The Forest of Stolen Girls.

[00:05:23] This is our May Buddy Read pick for Unabridged. And this is historical fiction. It is set in Korea in fourteen twenty-six, and the main character, Hwani, has returned to Jeju Island to investigate her father's disappearance. So her father is known as Detective Min, and he is an excellent detective who went to Jeju for two purposes.

[00:05:53] One is to investigate these 13 girls who have gone missing over several years,

[00:05:59] So, uh, Detective Min has two purposes in returning to Jeju. One is to investigate the disappearance of 13 girls who, over several years,s have gone missing, and nothing has ever been discovered about who has done this to them.

[00:06:12] And also he thinks that their disappearance may be connected to something that happened to Hwani and her younger sister, Maewol, when they were much younger. And in the course of his investigation, he has disappeared. So Hwani, who fancies herself sort of a detective, also decides to return to Jeju.

[00:06:32] Her sister has lived there since the incident happened,

[00:06:37] So Hwani and her father moved to the mainland, and Hwani has not seen her sister since this incident happened when they were 13 and 10.

[00:06:45] And every year her father would return to see Maewol just to, you know, make contact again. At several points, he kept saying he would reunite the family. Hwani later discovers that this is a little more complicated than what she had been told. So when Hwani arrives on Jeju, she is dressed as a man, because at this time it's definitely easier for single men to travel alone than it would be for her if she were dressed as a girl.

[00:07:14] She returns to this village, and she's immediately just swept up in sort of the corruption that is causing it to be difficult to determine what happened to these girls. There are a lot of people who have an interest in not admitting that they were taken or that they have gone missing because it makes them look bad, or because it obligates them in some way.

[00:07:39] And really, the only thing she has to go on is her sister's memory of what happened when they were young. So Hwani doesn't remember it at all, but essentially they were in the forest, something happened that Hwani doesn't remember, and the next morning they were found near the body of another giraffe, and her father was never able to figure out what went wrong.

[00:08:01] All that her sister Maewol remembers is that there was someone in a white mask. And so I'm at the point in the book where that has come back into play. So I am really loving it. I think that Hwani's perspective, because she is a bit of an unreliable narrator, both because of what she's been told her whole life and only knowing one side, and also because of this gap in her memory, makes her a great sort of point of view character for this kind of mystery novel.

[00:08:31] So I'm really interested to see how it unfolds. I'm loving it. This is June Hur's The Forest of Stolen Girls.

[00:08:37] Ashley: Yeah, I'm right in the middle of that one too, Jen. And absolutely, I'm really compelled. I've read several books that are set on Jeju, but never so far back. And so it's really interesting to see they have such an interesting culture that, you know, has a lot of renown. And so it's interesting to see some of the historical pieces of that as well.

[00:08:57] And then, yeah, I'm really interested in the mystery component of it and how it all unfurls.

[00:09:01] Jen: Yeah, I look forward to it. I hope it has a really satisfying ending. Well, fingers crossed. So, all right, well, we're going to move on to our main discussion. So each of us is going to recommend a romance that would be perfect for some beach reading. Ashley, what are you going to recommend?

[00:09:15] Ashley: I would like to recommend Alisha Rai's Partners in Crime. This one, I love Alisha Rai. I've read several of her books, but this I read just recently, and I started it and knew nothing about it, and I think there are so many things I love about it. But basically, we start with Mira, who is a 35-year-old accountant.

[00:09:39] She has a complicated past that takes a while to unfurl, but she definitely wants to get away from a lot of the dysfunction of her family and her past, and because of it, she has really kind of protected herself and kept to herself. But she's tried to do a lot of matchmaking to try to find a partner, and the matchmaking keeps not panning out, but some of it is because she guards herself so carefully to try to keep her past in the past and to keep people away from these parts of her family that she doesn't want anyone to know anything about.

[00:10:16] And so she's got a lot going on in that arena and is kind of feeling like she's just gonna be single forever, even though she would like to have a life partner.

[00:10:24] So Mira's got what she is trying to make a very stable life, but her aunt has passed away. She had already distanced herself from her father, and her mother had passed away. She kind of lost connection to a lot of her family, but she gets pulled in for this, like, reading of the will for her aunt. And when she goes to do that, she reconnects with Naveen, who was a former love interest from quite a while prior, and things had just kind of fallen apart.

[00:10:56] We, as the readers, perceive, in part, because she had this complicated history that she was trying not to let anyone know about her complicated history. And so, she runs into him as part of finding out what's going on with the will.

[00:11:10] Very quickly, this turns into a very intense situation.

[00:11:16] right away, they both get sucked into this very intense situation because her family's baggage is, like, catching up with her, even though she herself did not really have anything to do with it. So, we start to find out that her family has some criminal past, and that is all catching up now, related to what comes from her aunt's will.

[00:11:35] What I really loved is, like, at the center, we have Mira and Naveen, who clearly had a tenderness for each other, and yet have a lot of pain from the time that they were together prior, and then a lot of time has passed in between. And so, you have that piece.

[00:11:49] But then also, there is a significant mystery component. It's kind of heisty. A lot is going on that's very action-packed, and yet they are, like, bumbling their way through it because neither of them is particularly ready for an intense situation. And so, I felt like what I really loved with this one, which is different than the others that I have read, is just, like, the intensity of the situation.

[00:12:14] It's kind of thriller-like, but then you also have the romance piece that I would say she's known for as a writer. So, I think this is a really fun one. I think it's great for the beach. It is very fast-moving and has lots of twists and turns. So again, that is Alisha Rai's Partners in Crime, and I highly recommend it.

[00:12:33] I think it's really fun. It's the first in a series.

[00:12:35] Jen: Yeah, I have not read that one.

[00:12:37] Somehow, I missed it because I do love her books, and I try to read them as soon as they come out. So I'll definitely add that to my list for summer. Based on my TBR here today, I think.

[00:12:46] Ashley: I think you'll love it. And both of those that I have mentioned today are fast-moving, for sure. What about you, Jen? What's your recommendation?

[00:12:53] Jen: So I'm recommending Carley Fortune's Our Perfect Storm.

[00:12:56] Fortune has become one of those authors; she typically publishes a book every summer, and I always love them. I think she has a really great balance in her books of romance, but also of a deeper emotional storyline, I should say. So this book is about Frankie and George. So it opens at Frankie's rehearsal dinner, and she's sitting there with her family and with her very soon-to-be husband, but she has not yet seen George, who has been her best friend since they were eight years old.

[00:13:32] And until he shows up, she just cannot settle into enjoying this event that is for her. And he does eventually show up, but what becomes very clear is just how close they are, even though there is no hint yet of romance between them.

[00:13:49] She is really in love with her fiancé, which then becomes a problem because the next morning she finds a note that says he can't marry her. He's so sorry. And she does not know what has happened or what has gone wrong. She is understandably devastated, so she returns to her parents' home eventually, and is just trying to, you know, get the pieces of her life together emotionally and in every other way.

[00:14:18] Other things in her life have been falling apart, but because she was so happy with this future wedding, she doesn't worry about that; everything has descended upon her. And her best friend encourages her to take the honeymoon trip that was already paid for, and eventually she decides that she will go, and when George returns, he's going to go with her.

[00:14:42] So they go on this honeymoon trip to Canada in this very natural part of Canada, a very luxurious resort. So she and George were really inseparable for the longest time, but then in the past few years... they roomed together after college, and then at a certain point, he became a journalist, and he moved away for better opportunities.

[00:15:05] And since that happened, he's been traveling a lot. So while they've seen each other, they haven't been as close as they used to be. And so she is really reveling in the opportunity to be with him again. And he has planned a series of excursions designed to help her get over this loss of the future that she had planned for herself.

[00:15:30] So basically, each day he's sort of pushing her through, almost like the stages of grief, and plans these activities. And then, as you might guess, this is a friends-to-lovers romance. And so at a certain point, the attraction between the two becomes clear, and it starts explaining some things about their relationship.

[00:15:52] So I just really loved this. Both of them have parts of their backstory that inform who they have become today. So Frankie's mother, when she was, I can't remember exactly how old, I think she was seven or eight, left the family for a year. And she is an environmentalist, and she was working with whales.

[00:16:16] And that passion and that conviction that she needed to help these populations that were struggling became her focus instead of her family. And Frankie has really, even though her mother came back, Frankie has never really gotten over her decision to leave the family.r George first met Frankie when he moved in with his grandmother, who was their neighbor.

[00:16:41] And that is because his mother had died, and his father just did not feel capable of taking care of George by himself. And so, essentially, sent George to live with his grandmother. And again, this has definitely affected who George has become and the way he's approached life. And so I think that Fortune does a great job of developing both their pasts and their present in a way that shows how they were such good friends, but also perhaps why this romance might work out, which, you know, it's a romance, so of course it does.

[00:17:14] But you don't know exactly how they get there. So anyway, that is Carley Fortune's Our Perfect Storm, which I thought was really well done. And if you haven't read Fortune's books, I would recommend all of them. I think they've all been great.

[00:17:26] Ashley: Oh, I haven't read any of her stuff,f and that does sound great.

[00:17:28] Jen: Yeah.

[00:17:29] Ashley: I'll have to check that out this summer.

[00:17:29] Jen: Have to add her. She's an auto-reader for me. And, you

[00:17:32] Ashley: Oh.

[00:17:32] Jen: Something is comforting about those authors who just, you know, every summer they'll have a new one. I look forward to hers.

[00:17:40] Ashley: Yeah. That's awesome.

[00:17:41] Jen: Right, everybody. Well, to close out our episode, we are going to play the Lit Chat game.

[00:17:47] So today's card, I'm going to go ahead and read both questions, and you can answer both or either. First question is, do you finish every book you start? What makes you stop reading a book? And the second is, do you ever cheat and skip to the end of a book? Why do you do it?

[00:18:01] Ashley: Okay, question one, I hardly ever stop on a book. I think I used to abandon books sometimes, and I do on very rare occasions now, but, like, not consciously. Like, I still won't actually officially say, "I'm not gonna finish this book," and I'll just, like, leave it open forever on my reading list. And I think it's because once I started keeping track of what I read, I just couldn't bring myself to DNF a book, which is silly.

[00:18:33] So, I think that's something I would like to come back to. Like, I would like to say, like, "Oh, this book's not working for me, and I'm just gonna stop."But yeah, at the moment, no, I'm really bad at that, and I normally feel like I have to trudge through no matter how much I dislike something, which is silly.

[00:18:46] So, work in progress. For the other one, no, I don't ever skip to the end. Occasionally, if something is super emotionally intense and I cannot stand not knowing, I will Google whether the terrible thing happens. Sometimes I will do that, like, if I feel like I need to put at ease what that outcome could be.

[00:19:07] So, not often. I hate spoilers. But yes, on rare occasion, I will be like, "I just need to know if, like, this character's going to make it or not." or often, as I've said many times on here, if it's related to a dog, I need to know the outcome with the dog. And that doesn't mean I won't keep reading, but sometimes I just need to have that sorted in my mind so I can, like, proceed. What about you, Jen?

[00:19:30] Jen: Like you, I have a really hard time DNFing. I'm a pretty fast reader, and so usually if I'm not loving it, I do just power through to the end, which officially I do not recommend to my students. I encourage them to DNF books that they are not enjoying, and I think that is the right thing to do. But like you, I just...

[00:19:48] I feel like I can make it to the end, and why wouldn't I do that? And then I have a hard time sharing a negative review of a book I have not finished. And so, not that I'm out there sharing negative reviews all the time, but yeah, just even to talk about it with someone if I haven't finished it, I just don't know what I'd say.

[00:20:04] So I pretty much finish everything I start, and then I don't ever cheat and skip to the end of a book. My ritual is always when I get a print book to look at exactly how many pages there are in the book itself, because I have been burned before by thinking I have pages and pages to go, and then I realize there's like a reading guide at the end, nd or the acknowledgments are really long.

[00:20:22] I don't love that. But I don't read the end. I just look at the page number really fast and then turn back because, like you, I don't like spoilers. So yeah, so I don't really ever cheat. But even if you do that, I don't think that I would call that cheating.

[00:20:36] Ashley: Same.

[00:20:36] Jen: Yeah, I think that's just some people like to know what they're heading for, and then that's their option.

[00:20:42] It's not one I would choose, but I think that's fine

[00:20:44] Ashley: I think, you know, I know people who are like, they read the last line of the book every time, which again, is very off-putting to me, but that is just a reading preference. I mean, there's nothing wrong with it. Yeah.

[00:20:53] Jen: Yeah, I think that's fine. And you know, I reread books all the time, so my primary reason for reading is not always to find out what happens at the end. And so I think in some way,s then as you're reading, you could be considering the book in the context of what you know happens. Anyway, so I think if you do it, no guilt.

[00:21:12] That's fine. 

[00:21:13] Ashley: For sure.

[00:21:15] Jen: Does not prefer that. So, all right, everybody. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We would love to know if there are any romances you have on your TBR for the beach this summer or any that you would recommend for us. I'll just keep adding to my list as always. Thanks again for listening.

[00:21:31] Do you have comments or opinions about what you heard today? We'd love to hear them. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @unabridgedpod, or on the web at unabridgedpod.com for ways to support us. To get more involved, you can sign up for our newsletter, join a buddy read, or become an ambassador.

[00:21:50] Thanks for listening to Unabridged.

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