When I started writing The Summer Place to Be, I thought I was writing a women’s fiction novel about a forty-something divorced woman trying to put herself back together after her carefully curated life imploded.
Somewhere along the way, it turned into a story about reinvention, family dynamics, emotional baggage, and what happens when you reach midlife and realize the life you built no longer fits the person you’ve become. Before I knew it, I had somehow written a full-blown summer romance complete with a former country music frontman with a gravelly voice rough enough to leave road rash, a fictional small town inspired by Upstate New York summers, a tall, dark, and handsome therapy horse named Scout, and more emotional honesty than I intended to share with the general public.
After years of balancing corporate America, motherhood, marriage, and the constant self-inflicted pressure to “have it all together,” I wanted to write a love story centered around people who already had lives behind them. People with history—regret, responsibilities, complicated families, careers, messy exes, stretch marks, emotional scars, and enough self-awareness to know that falling in love at 44 feels very different from falling in love at 22.
Charlie Taylor, the heroine of The Summer Place to Be, is not starting from scratch. She’s starting from experience. That distinction mattered to me.
The novel is set in the fictional town of Lainey Springs, inspired by the Upstate New York summers where I grew up. Readers familiar with Saratoga Springs may recognize pieces of its spirit woven throughout the story: local dive bars still holding on to their history, horse-racing culture, live music drifting through warm summer nights, and the way returning to a place that remembers an earlier version of you can feel both comforting and complicated.
At 44, Charlie Taylor returns to her hometown looking for a reset, not a romance. Fresh off a divorce and rebuilding the curated life she once had, she plans a simple summer — helping her sister prepare for a long-awaited baby, reviving her interior design career, and hiding the fact that she’s one candy-apple red Corvette away from a midlife crisis.
That plan goes straight out the window the moment she quite literally collides with Jameson Clover.
Once the frontman of a chart-topping country band, Jameson has spent years choosing responsibility over reinvention. Now he runs his family’s bar and keeps his dreams firmly in the past.
Working together to prepare Jameson’s mother’s house for sale, banter gives way to something deeper. But just as their hearts begin to trust again, Charlie is tempted by an opportunity that would skyrocket her career, while Jameson is forced to confront the life he gave up and the guilt he never resolved. With uncertain futures and a ticking clock, their stolen moments together may be all this summer allows.
This emotionally grounded romance explores second chances, imperfect choices, and the courage to discover who you are when everyone else has already decided for you. And yes, there’s plenty of kissing, too.
The Summer Place to Be is available in trade paperback wherever books are sold, including locally at Hudson Valley Books for Humanity in Ossining, as well as in eBook and Audible formats through Amazon.
Readers who enjoy the emotional honesty and chemistry found in Abby Jimenez’s novels and the small-town summer nostalgia of Carley Fortune will feel right at home in Lainey Springs.
Melissa Trombetta is an Ossining resident.
- melissatrombetta.com
- @melissatrombetta.author
