First Summer

by Ekin Oklap

A dreamy debut novel about the summer love that changes two girls at the edge of adulthood.

“In the heat and the green haze that seemed to surround us both like a physical presence, I felt intensely awake.”

One afternoon at the start of summer, a teenage girl watches a new girl move in across the street. In Clara, she recognizes the same loneliness that she feels herself, but finds tenderness and laughter, too. Over hot, languid days spent talking and reading side by side in the garden, the narrator is awakened to the possibility of a true connection with another human being, free of the self-consciousness she feels with others.

Meanwhile, in a distant fictional galaxy, Nadia the space explorer—the protagonist of a childhood book series beloved by both girls—traverses the known universe with her companion Rosa. Their imagined adventures make sense of new and powerful feelings.

First Summer captures the innocence and agony of adolescence and the exquisite promise of love on the cusp of adulthood: a moment where fantasy is still vivid in the mind, even as adulthood looms. This story of the first summer of love echoes throughout the characters’ lives and will change them forever.

Genres: Fiction, Lesbian, LGBT, Queer, Summer, Literary Fiction, Romance

208 pages, Hardcover

First published May 21, 2026

Reviews

[Suz · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s satisfying to experience a gentle, tender little book. Two girls find each other in that soft, in‑between space of summer, the start of their lives, what could really be. A deep friendship morphing into a deep love, and where that would eventually meander through both lives, always simmering, always and forever. Explanations of that soul joining love were quite poetic minus any fluff, insightful, almost lilting us as a reader into the scene itself. On the grass, with them. That’s a big deal.

I love witnessing the introspection, one of the girls so aware of her own differences, constantly measuring herself against the world, this felt so familiar to me. It was like reading a version of my own simmering inner voice. Sometimes I don’t see similarities till I read them.

•••“So I would say something funny or splash some water in her face until she laughed and her eyes came alive once more. Only later, long after that season of my life had passed, would I come to recognize and regret the failure of courage, the selfish, paralysing terror which had prevented me from allowing those silences to settle into truth.”•••

That’s the tone of the whole book, quiet, observant and full of the things we may only understand years later.

The fictional story woven through didn’t grab me, but the girls’ relationship is worth the read on its own, reminding me I love character driven novels.

It’s short, quietly pensive and perfect for a thoughtful afternoon. I was in the sun, near the flowers and my own little free street library.

I fell in love with the ending, satisfying and provoking. Recommended for a short heartfelt piece of literary fiction, and may I say as a debut, very well done.

Thank you to the author and publisher for my review copy.

[paige (paigesofbookss) · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lonely teenage girl’s life changes forever when she befriends Clara, the new girl who moves in across the street. Together they spend the summer reading in Clara’s grandmother’s garden, swimming, and sharing their deepest thoughts. As their friendship blossoms into first love, they experience joy, heartbreak, and loss that will shape the rest of their lives.

Interwoven throughout the novel is a story set in a distant galaxy that mirrors the girls’ relationship and experiences.

This was such an intimate and emotional portrayal of love that goes beyond friendship, while also capturing what it truly feels like to experience loss. The way those moments echoed throughout the rest of their lives really stayed with me. It’s a short read, but one that packs an emotional punch while also celebrating friendship, first love, and the beauty of girlhood.

My one major gripe was the sci-fi storyline. While I understood what it was trying to do, it didn’t add much for me and often pulled me out of the emotional core of the story. I think the novel would have been even stronger had it focused solely on Clara and the narrator’s relationship.

Overall, this was a touching coming-of-age story that left me both smiling and heartbroken.

Thank you to the publisher for the ARC! First Summer releases August 18th. 🍋🌻

[Lakshmi 🌸 · Rating 2 out of 5]

First Summer had a premise that immediately caught my attention, and I went into it expecting an emotional, memorable coming-of-age story. Unfortunately, it never fully lived up to that promise for me. While the novel has moments of quiet beauty and introspection, I found it difficult to connect with the characters or become invested in their journey.

I just couldn’t get into the Nadia excerpts at all. Every time they came up, they pulled me out of the main story rather than adding to it. I kept waiting for the narrative to build into something more impactful, yet many scenes felt repetitive or emotionally restrained. As a result, the book never quite delivered the depth I was hoping for.

That said, I can still appreciate what the author was trying to achieve. There are thoughtful observations about growing up, relationships, and the fleeting nature of youth, and readers who enjoy subtle, character-driven stories may find more to admire than I did. It simply wasn’t the right book for me.


(ebook)

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why are the ratings so low? There really isn’t enough yearners 😂


☀️ “That summer I learned what it means to love somebody so much that you might actually be the same person with a different face and a different voice but with the same beating heart,” ☀️

Nadia has always been different, finding it hard to make friends and fit in, standing out in a town where the worst thing you can do is stand out. The arrival of a new girl on her street, Clara, is about to change everything.

Everyone says Clara and Nadia are joined at the hip, but the outsiders will never know how true that is. For the first time in her life Nadia can share everything with Clara, every odd thought and strangeness about herself and Clara not only sees her but has felt the same too. In one short summer Nadia goes from feeling like an island to being known, truly known.

I’m not a romance girly, but this book! The intensity and yearning, the fumblings of newness! This is the book that had me feeling so invested in this friendship turned relationship! And the fact that decades later they still reflect on this summer with love? Yes, more of this.

I also really enjoyed the book inside the book and how well it played off our storyline.

Sticky and sweet, this little book reads like a hazy summers day where nothing is set in stone and anything is possible, even a first love. Where love is time and time is infinite and fleeting when you only have one summer.

Nadia and Clara you will always have that summer.

[Sundar Parajuli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the quiet, tender feeling of this book. The friendship between Clara and the narrator slowly turning into first love was probably my favourite part. There’s something sweet about the intensity of a first friendship and first love, especially when you’re young and everything feels so new and important.

I also liked the way it captured teenage girlhood and growing up, along with the bittersweet feeling of looking back on those years.

My biggest issue was the Nadia sections. They often pulled me away from Clara and the narrator’s story, and sometimes felt more like a way of showing the main character’s feelings rather than letting us experience them through her. I also wanted a little more depth from the story.

[elby · Rating 3 out of 5]

sweet and sapphic, thought i didn't care for the galactic relationship. Coincidently my second consecutive read that has referenced jane eyre

[Faith Plotkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

My initial thought about this book is that appears to be set ambiguously. After reading a few reviews it’s appears the book was set in the late 90s in Australia. World building is important to readers especially in debut novels. I would have loved to know where this was set to help imagine the characters and their journeys better. Not sure if the writing style was intentional on some chapters being repetitive as it reads like a stream of consciousness. No one writes teenage girls better than previous teenage girls. Overall 4/5. Sapphic summer romance/coming of age novels always hold a place in my heart.

ARC from net galley

[carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars — A summer between two girls with a budding friendship and romance. I enjoyed how there was an explicit emphasis on the importance of both friendship and love.

I couldn’t connect with the Nadia dream sequence and felt like the author was utilizing these sections as a proxy to the main character’s feelings. I would’ve preferred hearing from the main character herself.

Thank you to Netgalley for the copy!

[Khin (storyatelier_) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4.25 stars

FIRST SUMMER looks back on that one homoerotic friendship with a girl best friend and the aftermath of the fallout. In this case, the fallout isn’t an argument, but that Clara had moved away and never told the narrator about it, and the narrator is so hurt by this huge omission that she cuts off any attempt Clara makes to get back in touch with her. It is with the benefit of hindsight, many years later when it’s far too late for the two of them, that she can look back on what they once had and remember it fondly. It is full of regret and yearning, reflecting on the intertwining of love and friendship, and how the narrator’s relationship with Clara brought her out of herself so she could learn to make other friends and love other people. This first love of that first summer, while not everlasting, had changed both girls in many ways, teaching them about love in ways that they only come to appreciate later in life. The novel itself is a meditation on the many ways love can be expressed, how it can change a person or their outlook, and make life a lot warmer and more colourful. More importantly, a love doesn’t have to be everlasting and unchanging for it to have meant something; it can be a crystal-clear memory frozen in time, as beautiful in retrospect as it had been at the time when it was flourishing.

[haslerroberson · Rating 3 out of 5]

First Summer is about the joy of a first friendship, the magic of your first love and the pain of your first heartbreak, and how intense each of these experiences tend to be. The story unfolds from the perspective of our nameless narrator as she spends her summer eating ice cream, playing tennis and frolicking across gardens and rivers with the new girl in town, Clara. Their connection is fast and furious, and I felt almost a sort of privilege getting to witness such an intimate bond- there is nothing so special as finding someone who truly understands and fully accepts you as you are. I enjoyed the range of emotion in this book, as well as the sort of melancholic haze that carried throughout, which I thought added to the nostalgia and striking sense of expired youthfulness.

[alexa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Super sweet, sapphic summer read. Happy Pride!

Needed to load up my Kindle before my trip, so I thought I'd give this one a try. I love when publishers send me recommendations without requesting.

Thank you NetGalley and S&S/Summit Books for the arc!

[Abby Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up.

What really bothered me at the beginning was I had no idea where and when this book took place. I thought it was the American South until the author used the word “mum” and from there I was thoroughly confused.

It was a cute, nostalgic-feeling coming of age love story, but not a romance. Themes of self-discovery in the dog days of summer. I love stories that take place over a short period of time.

At parts, almost giving stream of consciousness.

I could not for the life of me buy into the Nadia sections. I dreaded them. I really should have like them but I couldn’t commit and only looked forward to our main character and Clara.

For lovers of Sunburn and Last Night at the Telegraph club and maybe One Last Stop.

ARC from Netgalley.

[sri · Rating 3 out of 5]

That summer I learned what it means to love somebody so much that it feels like you might actually be the same person, with a different face and a different voice, but with the same beating heart.

this was such a beautiful short read, very reminiscent of sunburn in a way. the exploration of the characters and how it feels like to grow up alone but not LONELY and how difficult it feels to not have someone who gets you till you actually find someone who does but you end up losing them anyway.
their story felt doomed from the start so i was not surprised to read it end the way it ended. however, i cannot help but feel frustrated that our unnamed main character behaved the way that she did, inspite of knowing that when you are young you make decisions that you do later regret.
i am also not the biggest fan of the sci-fi side plot. even though it sounded very interesting in the blurb, it was not executed to it’s fullest potential and i often felt that it took away from the main story.
also, there was not enough…depth, for lack of a better word, to the story and the ending did feel a bit flat to me. i couldn’t exactly feel the emotions the author was trying to portray and that was unfortunately very disappointing:(

[tash · Rating 3 out of 5]

thank you to netgalley and summit books for providing me with this arc of ekin oklap’s first summer

i like the plot for the narrator and clara; the way we see their friendship develop, albeit rushed, is cute

however, like mentioned above, i feel like the book is quite rushed. also, i much preferred the relationship with the narrator and clara over the book series plot. with both points in mind, i think the book could’ve been better if the book series plot was left out entirely and focused more on the narrator and clara; maybe a couple of chapters could’ve been on clara’s point of view, but i definitely think the book plot wasn’t needed at all

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was so lush and delectable! It reminded me of “Sunburn” without the religious trauma. The writing was very detailed and such a joy to read. My only qualm with this book was the ending. Although, it did seem kind of necessary, I just don’t love the trope the author used to wrap things up.

Also, not sure how my local New Jersey library system got a copy of this on Libby considering it’s not even out in the US yet, but I’m not complaining. Might have to snag a physical copy of it when it comes out here.

[Tilde Tobin · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh this was so lovely <3 what a perfect, slim summer read. a touching, introspective coming of age story. im not sure the addition of sci-fi story worked for me, but everything else did. would love to reread this in the heat of the summer one day. 4.5 🌟/5
the spookiest part of this is how uncannily similar it is to one of my own story ideas (down to some oddly specific details). i suppose there is no original ideas anymore huh.

[emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

a perfect little time capsule of the endless summer of teenage days. i’ve been absolutely loving these sapphic coming of age stories lately! like some other readers i don’t really find the interludes necessary, it was a bit jarring to jump into the sci fi story every so often when the girls only actually talked about it once or twice. more detailed review coming soon!

[Melis Ulutas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful summer read!! This story about Clara and the unnamed narrator was nostalgic and melancholic; really giving the feel of those summers past. It was a tale about female friendships and your first true meaningful connection in life as a child that leaves an unmistakeable mark on you through your life. I enjoyed reading it and discovering a new Turkish author

[Nellie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 This felt so gentle and tender. I adored the ending.

I don’t know if it bothered me or enticed me that I COULD NOT place where this story took place?

[gracie · Rating 5 out of 5]

such a beautiful debut, definitely looking forward to the author's other works

[Frida Kahlo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This completely took me by surprise. Snacksized and bittersweet, like eating a ripe juicy peach and crying in the shower.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading this and feeling immersed in the summer these girls shared. The author’s ability to capture the bittersweet transition from child to adult, with both the good and bad that comes, felt nostalgic and relatable. The scifi stories they shared and the way it added to their relationship made the story even more interesting. I thoroughly enjoyed this story.

[Remi]

what's not to love about young love that blossoms during the summer?

*thank you to S&S/Summit Books for the ARC*

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

First Love Is Not the Same Thing as the Last Word
In Ekin Oklap’s “First Summer,” a brief romance teaches one lonely girl both the astonishment of being understood and the necessity of accepting what another person cannot tell her.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 9th, 2026


“The Unread Side of Summer” – An older narrator sits within reach of Clara’s final sealed letter while the house across the street remains half-hidden behind the dense greens, blue air, and yellow-orange flashes of the summer that first brought them together, turning distance itself into the image’s measure of what love can preserve without ever making another person wholly knowable.

Difficult as it is to imagine a love story organized around two unread letters, Ekin Oklap’s “First Summer” finds its sharpest drama in paper. At sixteen, its unnamed narrator receives a letter from Clara, who has just vanished from the summer they seemed to own together. She presses the envelope to her face, imagines what Clara has written, then burns it unopened. More than forty years later, another letter from Clara lands on her desk. This one survives. Oklap stops before showing us its contents. The first letter disappears because a frightened girl prefers her own explanation to correction; the second remains beyond the reader’s reach after the older woman has spent a lifetime learning how little another person can be made to yield. The symmetry is exact, but the moral pressure has reversed.

Everything begins in a summer with no interest in moderation. Sheets cling, bicycle frames sting bare skin, sleep grows feverish and ice cream becomes a local clock. The narrator, sixteen and practiced at making solitude look voluntary, reads on the porch beside a mother who rarely seems to look up. Across the street, Clara arrives to stay with her grandmother, known locally as Old Mrs Dickie. Soon the girls are reading in the garden, cycling through town, inventing biographies for strangers and developing a vocabulary that makes everyone else seem slightly underwritten. The dull ones are “oblongs,” the possibly interesting ones “wobblies.” It is adolescent taxonomy as flirtation, and Oklap understands that intimacy often announces itself first through nonsense no one else would find funny.

Much earlier than either girl can name what is happening between them, they have already practiced on fiction. Both adored a children’s science-fiction series about Nadia, captain of the battered SS Vela, and Rosa, the orphaned companion they have independently decided is in love with her. The books never quite say so; Clara and the narrator read loyalty, jealousy and protectiveness as enough. They learn to read desire in Rosa before they know how to read it in themselves. Soon their own Nadia-and-Rosa adventures turn catastrophic: wounds, rescues, deathbeds, separations. Clara repeatedly imagines Nadia injured and Rosa beside her, grieving or tending the wound. These fantasies do more than forecast the romance. They let two sixteen-year-olds try out fear, care and desire at a safe intergalactic distance.


“The Books Never Said So” – Two girls bend over the childhood adventures of Nadia and Rosa amid the cover’s thickest greens and warmest flower bursts, discovering desire first in somebody else’s story and only gradually realizing that the strange reading they share has begun to describe them too.

Even before desire becomes explicit, Clara changes the terms on which the narrator understands company. Childhood humiliations, strange fantasies, parental resentments, a stuffed lion she still talks to when she cannot sleep – none of it requires tidying before it can be handed over. Clara is not merely a flattering mirror. Her attention wanders toward the vulnerable: stranded creatures, lonely strangers, anyone who might be left behind. The narrator has spent years converting exclusion into a theory of preference: perhaps she simply likes being alone. Clara does not cure her solitude. She disproves its inevitability. Oklap’s more unusual choice is what follows. First love will mark the narrator without becoming a ruler laid against every later relationship.

The closeness accumulates through ordinary things. Oklap’s sentences are usually medium-to-long, lucid enough to hold an observation, a qualification and a later correction without calling attention to the joints. Her diction is plainspoken; the specificity lies elsewhere: sweat at the nape of a neck, creek water, scorched metal, sticky arms, a crooked daisy chain, a stuffed lion whose eye has once been sewn back on. The girls are also genuinely funny together. They watch a dreadful cooking show whose host treats olive oil like a guest star; they gossip, misclassify strangers and laugh at stories that would die outside the friendship. The silliness keeps the green haze from turning to amber. It gives their happiness enough air that the later grief does not feel pre-installed. Oklap is equally alert to the body’s less romantic education. An old humiliation at the public pool taught the narrator that growing up could turn an ordinary body into a social problem; swimming privately with Clara later reverses the terms, making water a place of freedom rather than scrutiny.


“Water Without Witnesses” – In the secluded creek, blue temporarily opens inside the series’ dominant green world as the girls float beyond the town’s scrutiny, turning water from a place where the narrator’s body once became publicly legible into one where it can simply belong to her.

Retrospection changes the rhythm without flattening the sixteen-year-old inside it. At that age the narrator wants verdicts: I knew her; she loved me; she lied; therefore I never knew her. The older voice has acquired slower grammar. It revises, qualifies, sometimes admits that several incompatible readings can remain alive at once. That is where Oklap’s prose is most persuasive. Less persuasive are the moments when she returns to explain what a scene has already settled. The impulse is understandable in a novel about misreading, but it can leave too little room for the reader to misread productively.

It is Clara’s hidden life that gives the distinction weight. She has not come to her grandmother because her parents are conveniently away on business, as the neighborhood has been told. Shortly before summer, Clara returns home unexpectedly and finds her mother unconscious beside an empty box of pills. She calls for help. She probably saves her life. The adults then send Clara away while her mother recovers and insist that what happened remain a family secret. All summer, the fact presses against the surface: catastrophic dreams, imagined deaths for Nadia, blankness around family matters, the sense that disaster is always just outside the frame. What first appears to be adolescent mystery turns out to be a child carrying an adult secret.


“The Part She Didn’t Say” – After the traveling play, a narrow yellow-orange stage light catches only part of Clara while the rest falls into deep green shadow, holding the tenderness of a near-confession and the uneasy truth that the narrator can see someone withdrawing without yet knowing why.

Painfully, the narrator notices nearly everything and understands the wrong thing. She sees Clara withdraw, knows there is a family secret and recognizes fear without knowing its source. When Clara is abruptly taken home after her mother improves, disappearance becomes betrayal. Clara calls; she refuses. Clara calls again; again she refuses. Then the letter arrives. She breathes in the envelope, imagines its apology for herself, lays it in the kitchen sink and strikes a match. It is the novel’s cleanest act of cruelty. Faced with Clara’s actual words, the narrator chooses the Clara she has written in anger. Her mistake is not that she failed to notice enough. It is that pain makes her turn partial evidence into a verdict.


“Ash in the Sink” – A small orange flame burns against a much larger green-dark kitchen, giving the cover palette’s warm accent its most dangerous concentration as the narrator destroys Clara’s actual words and keeps, for the moment, the version of Clara that anger has written for her.

After the fire, the problem changes shape. The narrator had believed that being loved by Clara meant being admitted everywhere inside her. One locked room makes her suspect the whole house. Years later she can see the childish absolutism in that bargain without pretending the hurt was childish too. Secrecy can injure closeness. It can also coexist with love. The narrator’s mother, otherwise so often emotionally elsewhere, understands this before her daughter does: after Clara leaves, she tries to tell her that other people’s lives are more complicated than they appear and that withholding need not mean indifference. The narrator angrily rejects the advice, then spends decades arriving at a version of it herself. Oklap is strongest when she lets those truths remain uneasily beside each other instead of making either cancel the other.

Part of what saves “First Summer” from the familiar cult of the lost beloved is what happens afterward. Months after Clara leaves, the narrator begins talking to two girls at school whom she once would have dismissed before they had the chance to dismiss her. She later understands that Clara made this possible. Having once been unguarded with somebody, she can no longer believe such recognition was a fluke. Friends, lovers, marriage and bereavement follow. Philippe Besson’s “Lie with Me” keeps first love closer to a permanent wound; Oklap lets it become evidence. Clara does not prove that nobody else will suffice. She proves that somebody else might.


“Two Girls She Would Have Missed” – Across an ordinary school space left deliberately pale and unfinished, the narrator moves toward two girls she once would have avoided, a modest crossing that quietly reveals Clara’s most lasting gift: not permanent absence, but the newly imaginable possibility of other people.

As the girls’ imagined universe recurs, Nadia and Rosa stop doing the same job. At first they are shared childhood lore; then they offer a language for desire; later they absorb fears of injury and separation. The final turn is the important one: they stop mirroring Clara and the narrator. Like the speculative fiction folded into Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin,” their adventures can say indirectly what the realistic narrative cannot yet hold, though Oklap’s invention is far simpler and deliberately juvenile. By the end, Nadia and Rosa are no longer explaining the main story. They are carrying an ending it cannot have.

Decades receive nothing like the space granted to that summer. Several weeks occupy most of the novel, while adult marriage, work, scholarship and widowhood pass quickly. The middle can therefore feel overfed: one more episode of Clara’s hidden sadness, one more turn of the narrator’s dependence, one more Nadia-and-Rosa disaster after the pattern is already clear. Yet the imbalance has psychological accuracy. Clock time and remembered time are rude to each other. One wet afternoon at sixteen may remain available in microscopic detail while ten adult years collapse into a clause. The cost is equally real: just when the adult narrator becomes interesting in her own right, the book hurries.

Inevitably, the publisher’s comparison to André Aciman’s “Call Me by Your Name” shadows the summer: heat, adolescent desire, a brief attachment with a long afterlife. The resemblance thins once the girls begin talking. They are peers, and their desire grows from friendship, private jokes, shared reading and the almost embarrassing relief of being understood. Clara enlarges the narrator’s world; she does not become a standard against which every later intimacy must fail an audition. “First Summer” is less interested in the lover one never gets over than in the first person who makes getting close to anyone else imaginable.

Much of Oklap’s best work depends on implication, which makes the late explanations conspicuous. The older narrator eventually spells out what Clara’s silence, the refused calls, the burned letter and the decades around its absence have already shown: people remain separate; love cannot compel disclosure; hidden pain does not retroactively erase affection. None of this is false. It is simply less interesting stated than staged. Oklap’s strongest moments leave an object behind and move on. The reader can do quite a lot with ash.

In the final chapter, Clara’s son arrives carrying news from the life the narrator never saw. His mother remembered that summer, called the narrator her first love, told her husband about her and taught her children not to hide from the people with whom they could be themselves. She even named a daughter after the narrator. The details are tender, but their cumulative effect is oddly prosecutorial. After a novel has spent so long teaching us to live with partial knowledge, Clara’s son arrives with a remarkable dossier of corroboration. For a few pages, the hard-earned uncertainty begins to look almost solved.

That makes the second envelope more than a sentimental echo. Clara wrote another letter before she died; her son places it in front of the narrator. The handwriting has aged, but she knows it immediately. Here is the document that seems poised to settle whatever remains unsettled, and Oklap stops before telling us whether she reads it or what it contains. The younger narrator destroyed Clara’s words because she preferred certainty to correction. The novel now refuses the reader the opposite fantasy – that one final document could make Clara completely available after death. The envelope remains closed to us.

Readers hardly need a topical gloss to recognize the pressure behind the book’s account of adolescent loneliness. Its claim is modest enough to be convincing. Belonging need not arrive as sudden social ease; sometimes one relationship simply proves that isolation is not destiny. Oklap is equally sensible about queer adolescence. The girls’ love is not the emergency. The emergency was already waiting in Clara’s family. Their romance can therefore be tender, selfish, funny, erotic, needy and occasionally cruel without being turned into punishment for itself.

Oklap finally leaves the realistic world and returns to Nadia and Rosa. They have been separated for years. Rosa waits on New Saturn, unsure whether Nadia and Lynx survived, until one day they appear outside her old home. Nadia has lost an eye. Rosa is scarred. Nothing has been restored to its earlier state, but they have found each other again. The scene does not correct Clara’s death or secretly reunite the women by proxy. It does something smaller and stranger: it lets the story the girls once shared hold the shape of a wish reality refused. Rosa recognizes the feeling as home.


“New Saturn, After” – The series’ bluest horizon belongs to the one reunion reality cannot provide: scarred Rosa waits until Nadia and Lynx finally emerge in the distance, and the childhood story the girls once used to rehearse loss becomes the place where separation can end without pretending it left no mark.

Part of what makes “First Summer” successful is also what makes its excesses easy to see. The explanatory passages, the repetitive middle and the abundance of late corroboration keep it from the highest tier, but the underlying design remains strong. 84/100 – 4/5 stars. Oklap is best when she trusts an object or arrangement to carry the thought: a scorched envelope, an empty chair, two bodies cooling in creek water, a battered spaceship returning after years away.

One thing finally distinguishes Clara from the conventional lost beloved: she is not the one person the narrator can never replace. Replacement turns out to be the wrong category. What survives the summer is an enlarged idea of what another person might make possible. The novel begins with a girl across the street who seems to have arrived from another world and ends with two women in an invented galaxy finding their way back to each other. Between them sits an unopened letter, quiet on a desk. It holds the one thing “First Summer” finally learns not to demand: the whole of someone else.


Compositional Thumbnail Sheet


Full Faint Pencil Underdrawing


Cover-Palette Proportion Swatch Sheet


Pencil + First Wash Stage


Loaded-Brush / Impasto Material Study


Character Anatomical / Gesture Study


Light / Value and Focal-Pressure Study


Watercolor Outer Border Details Study


Proportional Wash Map / Cover-Color Translation Ledger


Proposed Alternative Full Dust Jacket With Flaps


Series-Wide Color-Balance Strip


Watercolor Portrait of Ekin Oklap, author of “First Summer.”

All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.

[Jamie Rosenblit]

DNF @ 25%

[vivi ʚɞ · Rating 5 out of 5]

⋆˙✮ 5

I held it together for most of this book knowing what was coming, but I still teared up by the end of it. This is the epitome of a love story, not a romance— and if you don’t know the difference between the two, you’ll certainly find out after reading this.

The story follows our main character during her summer break, where she meets Clara, the granddaughter of her “oddball” neighbor, who’s temporarily visiting her town. Together, the two find solace in each other, both not having many friends. And what initially started out as a comforting friendship soon blossomed into something more, with lingering glances, hidden touches, and secret meanings.

This was such a treat to read. I genuinely felt like I was reading a diary entry of someone’s journey through all the messy things that come along with growing up— first loves, sexuality, and teenage awkwardness. Coming of age stories, especially ones like First Summer, serve as a reminder that not everyone you meet will become a permanent fixture in your life, but your time with them and the memories have the opportunity to linger, shaping who you become long after the moment has passed. It’s a universal language that I truly believe anyone can relate to in some way.

I was also wary about the Nadia excerpts after reading the blurb, but it 𝘵𝘰𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 worked for me. The way it was incorporated was done really well, and I even found myself looking forward to the next bits of Nadia’s “story” as I was making my way through the book.

The only thing I was left confused about was the author’s choice to not include when and where the book takes place. The town and the sizzling summer heat were described really well, but I had no idea it took place in the late 90’s in Australia until “Breakers” was mentioned, which I came to find out was an Australian TV show. I don’t think I’ve ever had to go through the trouble of Googling something like that for a book until now, but who knows, maybe it was intentional since the book reads like a journal entry.

With only 208 pages, this was a very quick and enjoyable read that left me reflective and almost nostalgic in a way. This was truly a great debut novel.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for the eARC. All thoughts are my own.

[LLJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to #NetGalley along with #Simon&Schuster #SummitBooks for the opportunity to read and review #FirstSummer by #EkinOklap in advance of its release later this summer (8.18.2026).

My initial experience while reading the book was that I inadvertently requested a young adult novel which is not a genre I seek out but because the book is relatively short I decided to stick with it to see where it went. I would certainly classify it as a coming of age novel with a young adult feel but the plot took on a weightier and, for me, deeper and more interesting feel toward the very end (in a way that made the majority of the book more of a flashback from an advanced age). I really enjoyed the latter part of the novel (so much that it felt like I was reading a different book).

The narrator of the novel presents as a socially awkward and naive young women who seems to only have one acquaintance, a neighborhood "good guy" named Joe, until another similarly awkward girl named Clara moves in with a relative right up the street. The girls meet and immediately hit it off and in no time they are an inseparable pair (allowing Joe to be a third in their adventures).

In the meantime, a parallel plot line emerges that tells the story of Rosa, Nadia, and Lynx (animated sci fi characters from books that both girls revel in and this serves as an additional bond between them). Both storylines vacillate between a childlike adolescence/innocence and the exploration of newly emerging passions. I could see what the parallel storyline was supposed to be doing but found it entirely unnecessary. Again this may be because it reinforced the young adult feel of the book and I further struggled to stay invested with both storylines. The animated portion, it seems to me, tries to come at same-sex love and friendship from a fairytale perspective and detracts from the primary story.

Again, the best part of the book for me is the end (no spoilers). I'm sure this one will have an appreciative and devoted audience but it feels as if they will be younger and more interested in the secondary plot and the coming of age aspects of the book. Thanks for allowing me to read/review and I wish Ekin Oklap all the success in the world!!

[anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Special thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

3.5 ⭐️s

Overall, I had a good time with this one. There was a very dreamy vibe to the narration that I loved, with the story drifting through the daze of this one sizzling summer in a way that felt like passing through memories. For me, the lack of definitive (or, at least, easily identifiable) setting just further added to this feeling of reminiscence—like the narrator is so honed in on the Clara of it all that she’s only really remembering the details in relation to their time together. Their story was equal parts endearing and heartbreaking to read, and I loved (almost) every second of it. Minor qualms to come in a sec.

First, the intergalactic plot. Was it absolutely necessary in order to fully understand the character dynamics at play in this book? No, probably not. But I had fun! I adored the trio as a whole, and the yearning between Nadia and Rosa amidst the chaos of near-constant space-shootouts was so good. My only teensy tiny complaint here is that I wish this had all tied in with the main plot a liiiittle bit more, but I honestly was so entertained by this storyline from start to finish that I don’t care all that much. It did its work in amusing me—sometimes that’s enough!

Onto the minor qualms: things got a bit repetitive at times, and I didn’t totally love the ending for the main plot. Now, the repetition very well could’ve been intentional—I noticed it more in moments when the narrator was dwelling on a memory, or falling into a sort of routine-based time loop—but it just didn’t always land for me. And as for the ending, it really was just the Very End that dragged for me a little bit. While I can definitely see the appeal in the narrator getting the closure that she does, I think I would’ve personally preferred something a little more open-ended.

All in all, this was a fun (minorly devastating) little weekend read.

[Summer · Rating 5 out of 5]

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I'm going to say this first because it BOTHERED ME but I feel like the publisher did this book a great injustice by not mentioning that it's set in Australia around either the summer of 1998 or 1999. The only way I figured it out is because the narrator mentioned the TV show Breakers, and I Googled it.

Literally, WHY WOULD YOU HIDE THAT? That's the best part! Am I going to get in trouble for revealing it here? Was it supposed to be a big secret or something? SO WEIRD.

It's necessary info because it partially explains the behavior of the main character. To me, the main character feels neuro-diverse-coded, and despite being sixteen, she thought and behaved more like a twelve-year-old. (This isn't to disparage the writer or the book, as you see, I gave five stars. Just as precocious sixteen-year-olds who act twenty-four exist, so do ones who act much younger. Those stories are interesting and worth telling, too. Actually, sometimes they are even more fascinating. The loss of innocence at such an older age after having been sheltered too long can be brutal.)

At 208 pages, it was a quick read, like a curated summer journal of a teenage girl's sapphic summer awakening, filled with honest, raw, embarrassing detail. Something to get lost in for a day, preferably outdoors in the shade of a porch overlooking a grassy yard on a hot sunny day while wearing a sundress and sipping lemonade, or by the pool or the beach.

The sprinkling of Nadia fanfiction was a nice touch.

[SVL · Rating 4 out of 5]

***3.5 stars rounded up to 4 on here***

This was a super speedy read at 208 pages and is basically a teenage girl’s abbreviated journal entry detailing her sapphic summer awakening. I thought the writing was detailed and compelling and I loved the ending. The Nadia fanfiction entries were an interesting touch too, though I didn’t think they strengthened the overall story.

A teenage girl plans to spend the summer lonely until a neighbor’s granddaughter, Clara, comes to stay in the neighborhood. In this new girl Clara, our narrator sees herself reflected, and the girls become intimately close, spending all their days together, sharing stories and experiences, and slowly falling in love, until summer ends and they go their separate ways. The plot really focuses on their time together and the author does a great job laying out all their experiences together in great detail. This book would be a great read at the beach during the summer, or cooling off in a sunny meadow. As previously mentioned, it’s a fast read.

I loved the ending and the maturity arc the narrator experiences as she recounts that past summer as an adult. Plus, I love a good plot tie up and the happy ending of sorts that the author arrives at. I took off a star because I wanted more info about the setting and point in time this took place. The experience was almost universal feeling but I wanted more info about the situational factors that influenced the narrator.

This book publishes on 8/18/26. Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for the eARC.