I was just on summer holiday at my family’s traditional campground/resort, in Christina Lake, BC. Visiting with my cousin and my aunts, walking the same paths I’ve taken for literal decades, reflecting on all that has changed, and hasn’t, this book changed for me. 

I actually read it a few weeks ago. I loved Skim, and had been excited for this graphic novel, but I don’t think I gave it the time and attention it needed, and at the time it didn’t really hold up for me. Now, looking back at the book with memories of my own confusing teenaged summer holidays fresh, and revisiting the book, it is a beauty. I sympathized so much with so many of the characters: the first attraction for another boy (even completely out-of-league), the confusion that comes with the glimpses into the next stage of life, straddling childhood and teenagerhood and not really fitting in with either.

The book follows Rose, a girl leaving her childhood, and her family who vacation each year at Awago Beach. Windy, a girl nearly 2 years younger than Rose, is a close friend from childhood who also visits the beach community each summer. Through the pages, we follow them as Rose teeter-totters between the innocent friendship with her younger childhood friend, and first steps into teenagerhood as she develops a crush on a clerk at the local store. All the while, Rose’s parents are fighting, a young woman in the town becomes accidentally pregnant (a point of gossip between Rose and Windy), and Rose and Windy struggle with peer pressure and exposure to peer expectations between each other and the other teenagers of Awago Beach. 

The Tamakis did this so well with Skim, and again with This One Summer. The writing and illustrations are evocative and made me truly feel all that terrible confusion of being 13 and away on summer holidays, but also the tender, heartfelt bonds between friends and family that grow so strongly on a lakeshore. 

This book has a lot of tough topics, but is beautiful and is an excellent read.