As a mom of four, I’ve struggled to find time to read over the years — but I’ve done it. Now that my twins are turning nineteen and my “little guys” are eleven and almost thirteen, I should have more time. But I don’t. As some life stages end, others start. College forms replaced preschool. NeeDohs replaced knee socks. My tastes are skewing a bit older as my nest thins out, but once a mom, always a mom. Here is the summer reading list I’d tell the group waiting for pick-up with me in the afternoons to add to their nightstands.
1. Forty Love by Jane Costello
When Jules’s only daughter goes off on a gap year adventure, she doubles down on her work at an Anthropologie-like store but longs for something fun on the side. When she ventures into the nearby tennis club, she gets drawn into tennis thanks to her friends, her brother, and an old flame who just so happens to play there as well. Warning: steamy scene in the shed! But it’s more than a fun mom-com. Jules had lost her husband years ago and only now gives herself permission to fall for someone again. Written by bestselling UK author Jane Costello, this smart, witty novel is not only a quick beach read but also a permission slip to women everywhere to have fun, learn, love, and bound into the next chapter, rackets held high.
2. The Gulf of Lions by Caitlin Shetterly
When Alice decides to travel to France with her two daughters for the summer and leave her husband Pete at home, a form of punishment after he cheated on her, she learns to navigate a new landscape. Traveling with kids is never easy, and this trip brings unique challenges, including what happens when your daughter wants to go to parties in foreign lands with sketchy men?! What Alice learns, especially while coping with her own breast cancer battles, is to be open to new things, new men, new experiences, and yet ultimately coming back to the things that matter most.
3. Selfish by Kerry Docherty
Married mom, former athlete, spiritual guru, and co-founder of the clothing brand Faherty Kerry Docherty decides to assert her own wants and needs. No surprise, it doesn’t always go over smoothly when the mom running the ship pauses to factor in her own desires. Kerry’s emotional affair with a famous musician coupled with her pushing back against the other founders of Faherty — her husband and his twin brother — make for jaw-dropping drama in this thought-provoking, vulnerable memoir.
4. Adulting for Amateurs by Jess H. Gutierrez
Jess H. Gutierrez and her firefighter wife are raising kids while trying to make ends meet in Arkansas in this absolutely hilarious, spot-on personal narrative about the injustices of just getting older, the things we do for friends, and more. I laughed out loud many times.
5. Crash Into Me by Robinne Lee
You might have seen the smash hit movie “The Idea of You” with Anne Hathaway based on Robinne’s last novel of the same name. Now she’s back but has written a deep exploration of what one Black woman wants, a woman who moved away from France to become enmeshed in a mostly White high-end Los Angeles neighborhood, who takes up with a woman from her past. It’s really about loyalty, lust, friendship, motherhood, being a wife, and what it all really means. Utterly immersive.
6. The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff
When a fire breaks out as a young couple is on the verge of divorce, their home burns down and they move in with the wife’s parents. As it turns out, her parents are also hiding something: her father has early onset Alzheimer’s. The secrets swirl in this breathtakingly beautiful novel about memory, family, loyalty, love, second chances, and parenting while the ground is shifting beneath you.
7. Rewilding: Freedom, Friendship and Finding Our Way Home by Jane Green
When bestselling author and mom Jane Green decides to shed her people-pleasing ways and choose herself, upending her marriage after her children left the nest, she discovers a whole new, natural approach to the world in this raw, open testament to reinvention.
8. Humans Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity and Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI by Dana Suskind
A concrete framework for parents about how to navigate the whole new world of AI in relation to raising well-adjusted children with lives steeped in human, not artificial, connection.
9. Imogen in Waiting: A Memoir of Modern Reproduction by Lindsay Bartels
Should she have the child, now an embryo of a daughter who carries the BRCA1 gene, or not? This is the question that still lingers at the end of Lindsay Bartels’s rocky path to motherhood that involves cancer, crossing countries, two sons, and the what-ifs.
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#momlife Beach Reads for Summer
