The Matchbreaker Summer

April 25, 2022
In Rains’s (The Christmas Village, for adults) whirlwind YA debut, set at a North Carolina summer camp, a high school junior reconciles her imagined future with the unpredictability of reality. Paisley Manning has helped her mother run Camp Starling since the death of its founder, Paisley’s father, four years before. The teen is thrilled to finally be a counselor, but her elation sours abruptly when her mother announces that it’s the camp’s final session—after this summer, they’re selling the camp and moving to Wyoming to live with her mother’s boyfriend. When Paisley confides in troublemaking co-counselor Hayden Bennett, the pair plot to split up Paisley’s mother’s relationship and thus ensure that everything stays the same—but Paisley never expected to find a perfect match in her fellow matchbreaker. The novel is interspersed with Paisley’s journal entries, detailing her emotions from the highest highs of her slow-burn courtship to the lowest lows of her fear of letting go and unresolved grief over her father’s death. It’s an optimistic romance that handily embodies the pleasing rhythm of summer camp. Most characters cue as white. Ages 12–up. Agent: Sarah Younger, Nancy Yost Literary.