Silly, goofy, unapologetically over-the-top and absurd, but somehow still grounded and sweet when it needs to be.

Underneath the preposterous marriage-camp premise, Till Summer Do Us Part is about performance. Scottie performing success by forcing herself to fit a strict sociocultural mold, Wilder performing unseriousness and false ease, and both of them performing a fake relationship that accidentally makes their real wounds impossible to hide.

It's about being brave enough to let someone see the person behind the performance, about learning to let yourself be heard after being neglected. While the book leans hard on its romcom tone, Quinn is careful with the emotional stakes, and for the most part, their wounds and progressions as characters and as a couple feel real and earned.

Scottie especially is an immediately compelling character. She isn't healing from a messy divorce, but from the relationship that led up to it. Quinn paints a realistic portrait of what a neglectful relationship can do to one's mental health and self-worth.

Scottie struggles deeply with insecurity and anxiety, feeling like she isn't worthy of care, and feeling like her emotions, thoughts, and desires are not worthy of attention. This insecurity leaks out into everything she does, including the initial lie that creates the fake marriage setup with Wilder in the first place.

Scottie and Wilder's relationship is like oil and water. Their wounds conflict on the surface but uniquely answer each other when explored deeply. This premise could have easily become "laidback man saves uptight woman through hijinks and sexcapades", a flattened story about a broken woman being fixed by a good man.

Scottie and Wilder exemplify how a caring, attentive relationship can provide both partners with a safe space to do the internal work on their own. Neither partner fixes the other. Instead, they hold each other gently as they process their wounds and grow toward the future.

The fake marriage-on-the-rocks setup feels like a fresh take on the trope. The high stakes of the situation push Wilder and Scottie straight toward the messy parts of themselves, which flips the expected romantic journey on its head. Instead of discovering the most healed, regulated versions of each other first, they are thrown into situations that trigger them and force the darker sides of their wounds out in the open.

The absurdity of the marriage camp feels purposeful, albeit intentionally exaggerated for comedic effect. Quinn pokes fun at marriage culture and its cult-like adherence to heteronormative social scripts by surrounding Scottie and Wilder with forced intimacy, public couple pressure, sexual performance, and the idea that relationships can be repaired through cookie-cutter rituals instead of honesty. The setting creates natural moments of intimacy, but also natural chances for rupture and repair, and spotlights the unique compatibility of Scottie and Wilder.

While the mechanism of the marriage camp itself is pointedly funny, Quinn struggles with letting the absurdity speak for itself, and tries to shoehorn in as many jokes as possible. When the narrative gives the comedy room to breathe, there are naturally funny moments that genuinely made me laugh out loud.

Each of these naturally funny moments is offset by an overwhelming amount of forced jokes and relatable humor that is sure to become outdated in less than a decade's time.

The smut is heavy in the last third, but it all serves the narrative and I loved watching Scottie learn to use her voice with Wilder's coaxing. Wilder's caretaking finding an outlet in encouraging Scottie to explore her sexuality and desire felt so sincere and genuinely sweet. However, the dynamic borrows BDSM/kink flavor, so it would have been nice to have one scene where Scottie and Wilder explicitly discuss consent, boundaries, and limits.

Scottie clearly has agency and her POV makes her desire legible, but Quinn chooses to show consent implicitly via the narration rather than an explicit boundary conversation. Since the sexual intimacy gets increasingly dom/sub coded, not having that conversation leaves too much room for interpretation and misreading.

While I loved Scottie's character, Wilder's backstory feels half-baked and dips into ableist-adjacent shorthand as the book uses disability and mental health crisis as a narrative tool. It takes far too long for Quinn to show us some interiority from Wilder beyond his jokester persona, so when we finally get the full story behind his caretaking wound, it's too late to give it the attention and care that it deserves. This makes the other characters involved feel like they lack agency and interiority, denies them full personhood, and ultimately holds Wilder back from feeling like he has a fully satisfying arc.

Finally, the epilogue feels lazy and disappointingly conventional, especially for a book otherwise interested in poking fun at marriage and heteronormative performance.

Still, the couple's arc worked because Scottie and Wilder answer each other's wounds so specifically. I particularly loved that Quinn gives both characters space in their POV chapters to self-reflect, process, and grow on their own, rather than outsourcing their healing onto each other.

While sometimes being alone is what we need to heal, some wounds can be mended by allowing ourselves to be held by someone, by understanding the possibility of future hurt and facing it anyway. The post-camp sequence especially sold this for me, because it gives the relationship a chance to flourish outside the performance that created it.

Till Summer Do Us Part is far from perfect, but it ultimately imagines the possibility of healing through connection after heartbreak. When the book worked for me, it worked because Scottie's need to be heard and seen felt painfully familiar, and Wilder's care felt specific and genuine. The romance works because they spend much of the book resisting each other until they learn to stop performing long enough to listen to each other and to themselves.

A collection of poetry on family, history, violence and justice, Janice Mirikitani has written something utter raw, something guttural and loud and desperate, desperate in the sense that you are doing something, you are doing all you know how, and you want for it so badly to work.

The author has connected her family's stories to the greater struggle of Japanese American discrimination, and then take her family's stories and Japanese American discrimination, and applied that to broader struggles for justice and future.

There is hope in this book, hope that reminds you of dirt under your nails and crying as you hold someone you love. I hope everyone gets the chance to read this someday.

This was a great conclusion to the Cozyverse and the story of these small-town omegas. I have to say I think Summer's story was one of my favourites next to Ivy's. Eliana Lee does a great job balancing all of the characters, giving them each depth in their personality as well as enough time for us as the reader to really get connected to them.

One of my favourite aspects (other than Jae's tattoos and piercings 😏) was honestly the relationship between the brothers. It was quick and witty and incredibly believable, which is something I've realized can be difficult to achieve when trying to capture the dynamics siblings can have. Summer's wit blended very well with theirs, which made reading about their interactions even more enjoyable.

Summer is my favourite kind of FMC. Sarcastic, witty, and straight to the point. She didn't have time for miscommunication, and when it did happen because one or more of them fell to their fears and insecurities, it was resolved quickly and in a way that actually satisfied me. Which is also another thing I realized is hard to achieve, but that's more of a me problem.

Something else I loved was the exploration of insecurity of being "other" in a community and eventual acceptance of identity and culture. As an African bi-racial woman who also ended up moving into a very white town, this aspect of the story really spoke to me. I was very lucky in the fact that my mother was staunch in her sharing her culture with me, but there is only so much you can do surrounded by a community like that (I don't even speak or understand her languages yet, and she speaks 4 of them). I loved reading about how Summer came out of her shell enough to want to share her cultural foods with the community she grew to love, and how Jae kept his name to stay connected to his own. It meant a lot to me that these elements were included and given the importance they deserved in the story and characters.

A big thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC of the book, and I had so much fun with it.

This story could have been an email.

if i wanted to read transcripts from therapy, id email my own therapist. also? not nearly enough tteokbokki