Nothing holds my attention like a romance

[00:00:00] KRISTINA FOREST: What I love particularly about romance, you'll find a book that you really, really like, and you'll be like, "This was amazing." And you'll look up the author, and they've written like 50 other books, and you're like, "Perfect. I'm getting them all."

ANNE BOGEL: Hey readers, I'm Anne Bogel, and this is What Should I Read Next?. Welcome to the show that's dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next? We don't get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read.

[00:00:46] Readers, today I'm excited to dive into the world of summer reading with Kristina Forest, contemporary romance writer and author of the 2026 MMD Summer Reading Guide title, The Summer Girlfriend, which appeared in our Seaside Stories category and is available on bookstore shelves now as it was just released on June 9th.

I described it in the guide as a sweet summer romance bursting with bookishness and baked goods. The plot hinges on a fake relationship that blossoms out of a bookstore meet-cute. The beach setting was inspired by a handful of real places, some of which surprised me, and Kristina's deep and abiding love for the Jersey Shore.

The family's warm and inviting beach home is a character in its own right, and a Black-owned family business that makes delectable baked goods features prominently in the story. And of course, romance and chemistry feature prominently in these pages.

We are going to get into all of it today, along with some of Kristina's very favorite titles for beach reading season, whether you need a paperback to toss in your beach bag, or you won't be going anywhere near the beach anytime soon and would welcome a vicarious vacation. I can't wait to share this conversation with you. Let's get to it. Kristina, welcome to the show.

[00:01:56] KRISTINA: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

ANNE: Oh, the pleasure's mine. Congrats on your new release.

KRISTINA: Thank you so much. I'm really excited for it.

ANNE: We're talking before the day, but The Summer Girlfriend enters the world on June 9th, so it'll be ready and waiting whenever readers are listening.

KRISTINA: Yes, just in time for summer.

ANNE: Exactly. All right. Well, I'm so excited to talk today. I really enjoyed your book, but I've been reading you for years, and I know many of our listeners as well. And you're probably new to some of our listeners, so I hope you all enjoy listening in and meeting a new-to-you author.

But Kristina, could we start by just giving the readers a glimpse of who you are? Would you tell us a little bit about yourself?

KRISTINA: Yes, sure. So I'm Kristina Forest. I am a romance novelist, contemporary romance particularly, but I started my career writing YA romance in 2019. I am a born and raised Jersey girl. I'm very proud of that, even though I spent about a decade of my life living in New York City, which I also sort of feel like a New York City person still.

[00:02:59] I worked in publishing, children's books publishing, for many years. I love reading romance novels, which is probably not a surprise to a lot of people. My favorite subgenre is historical romance. That is definitely my happy place of reading, of reading, period, is historical romance. But that's what got me into reading romance novels.

I was reading Tessa Dare, and Beverly Jenkins, and Lisa Kleypas, and from there I started reading contemporary. And it was really The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang that made me a bigger contemporary romance reader. I believe that novel published in 2018, I think is when that came out. From there I went to Jasmine Guillory, Nisha Sharma, and Alisha Rai. I was discovering so many contemporary romance authors.

But The Kiss Quotient was the book that I read, and I thought, "Oh, maybe I could do this too." Because at the time I had been writing YA, but I wanted to try and write adult romance. And so romance novels is like what I live and breathe.

[00:04:10] ANNE: I am so curious about the leap from YA to adult. It never occurred to me that... I mean, what do I know, Kristina? But it never occurred to me that reading one specific work would be the impetus. I'd love to hear more.

KRISTINA: Yes, sure. After I graduated from undergrad, I went to undergrad in New Jersey, I took several creative writing classes. And at the time, because I was younger, I was reading a lot of YA, particularly YA romance. I was a huge, and still am, but I was a huge fan of Sarah Dessen when I was in high school.

I took a creative writing class in high school, and my teacher brought in her father, who was an author. His name is David Lubar, and he wrote middle grade and YA. He gave a presentation on his books, and he essentially made a comment that was... he said something to the effect of, "Oh, my books helped put your teacher through college." And it just was like a light bulb in my head because I really loved to read, but it had never occurred to me that it was a career, if that makes any sense.

[00:05:19] You know, I was 17 at the time. I was like, "I really like reading books," but I didn't think of the career of being an author the same way that I thought about being a teacher or being a lawyer or something like that. I was like, "Wow, this is a career where he makes a livable wage, to the extent that he can help put his daughter through college?"

And I thought, again, about Sarah Dessen, I was obsessed with her books, and I was like, "I really want to do that, but I want to write those kinds of stories featuring people who look like me, with Black characters." From there, it was literally that moment at my senior year of high school when I took that creative writing class that I decided that I wanted to be a writing major in college, and thankfully, my parents didn't ask a lot of questions. They did not ask me really... I don't think my dad said anything. He was like, "Okay." My mom was just like, "Okay, fine," you know? I was very lucky that they just-

ANNE: They thought you'd come to your senses on your own.

[00:06:19] KRISTINA: No. It was more just like I was a very determined kid. I was like the kid who would come home from school on Fridays and do my homework right away. That's just a perfect way to sum up the way that I was when I was younger. I think definitely still like that as an adult but I think that my parents just knew that I... I think they just trusted that I knew what I was doing to the extent that a 17-year-old can know what they're doing. But yeah, they didn't ask me any questions.

And so I was a writing arts major, which I think is a major that's particular to my college, which was Rowan University. And so I had to take several creative writing classes while I was there. I had a few professors who read some of my short stories, which were primarily middle grade and YA. They encouraged me to apply to get my Master of Fine Arts, which was great because I had no idea what I was going to do after graduation.

[00:07:13] These few professors encouraged me to apply to grad school, and so I applied to The New School in New York City and I was accepted into the Writing for Children program, so then I moved. While I was studying, I had a few internships because I thought it would be important to learn the inside of the publishing industry if I wanted to be an author. Essentially, I wanted to know how the sausage was made.

My first internship was at Macmillan in their children's publishing department. And I wanted to stay in New York. You know, like a lot of people, I moved there and fell completely in love. It's still my favorite city. And it's very expensive, so I needed a job.

So while I was in grad school, I was interning in publishing, and one of the internships turned into a job. This was at Simon & Schuster. A quick way to sum that up is while I was working at S&S, I graduated from grad school, and my graduate degree, as you can imagine, was not cheap in New York City. And I was like, "I need to make all the loans that I took out to get this degree worth it," and so I became very determined to get an agent and to get a book deal.

[00:08:29] And so what I was working on was my first novel, which was titled I Want to Be Where You Are. This was a YA rom-com about a ballerina who goes on a road trip with the boy next door to a dance audition. At the time, I really was inspired, again, by Sarah Dessen, but also authors like Jenny Han, Stephanie Perkins. I thought that I would spend my career writing YA.

I wrote three YA novels, and I loved the experience. I think that there's something very fulfilling about writing for youth. And I loved meeting librarians and younger readers out at the festivals because they loved the books, and they wanted to see more books like that, particularly young Black readers who are looking for books like that. Because when I was in high school, there weren't a lot of contemporary YA romances featuring young Black girls. And so I really took a lot of pride in being able to write those stories for young girls who were like me, how I was when I was in high school, who were looking for those books.

[00:09:41] Then I turned 30. I was turning 30, and I just sort of felt like I had said all I wanted to say in the teen space. Also because I was working in children's books publishing, a lot of what I read was children's literature, of course. And so I'm reading picture books and chapter books and middle grade and YA all day.

I started reading adult fiction for pleasure because it was a way to separate what I was doing for work from my personal life. A friend of mine worked at St. Martin's Press, and she was a publicist who worked on a historical romance, and we used to send books back and forth to each other. And one day she sent me a box of mass market historical romance novels, and when I tell you, I think I read that entire box in like two weeks. I was like, "Oh my God, this is amazing."

ANNE: Oh, that sounds like a peak. I mean, we're talking in June, so it sounds like peak summer experience. Wow. It brings back so many childhood memories, too, of trading books with my neighbor. I mean, boxes of books. What a delight.

[00:10:46] KRISTINA: I know. We would just send each other packages. That's another plus of working in publishing is just the amount of leftover or free books that you find around the office. That feeling that I had of discovering these historical romance novels reminded me of like you're saying of when you're younger and you find a book that you really love.

What I love particularly about romance, but because I'm talking about historical, I'll stay there, is you'll find a book that you really, really like, and you'll be like, "This was amazing." And you'll look up the author and they've written like 50 other books. And you're like, "Perfect. I'm getting them all." And you can just immerse yourself in the author's entire backlist.

[00:11:32] I think this might be the first year that I haven't done it, but I usually pick one author and I just read their entire backlist for a couple months at a time. And it's the most enjoyable experience because a lot of the times it's series which then break off into other interconnected series and you're just immersed in this world of this family or these friends. Nothing captures my attention the way that a romance novel does.

ANNE: That sounds incredible. Who are some of the authors you've done this with?

KRISTINA: Oh, gosh, Lisa Kleypas, Beverly Jenkins, Tessa Dare, Laura Kinsale, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, who writes... she is actually the romance author who invented the sports romance genre.

ANNE: What?

KRISTINA: In my opinion. And I think a lot of people would agree with me.

ANNE: We like a hot take.

[00:12:29] KRISTINA: Yeah. Because her Chicago Star series is about a team of football players. The Chicago Stars are a fictional football team, and the different women who fall in love with either these players or these coaches. But maybe didn't invent it, but she popularized it, as she made it very popular in the '90s and early 2000s.

So I did that with her, and that was a great time. Last year it was Laura Kinsale. I read a bunch of her backlist. And she's a historical romance author. But I haven't had time to do it this year. This has been a busy... It's probably the busiest writing year that I've had, this year has been. So I'm way behind on anything, any reading.

ANNE: I trust you'll catch up in the fall.

KRISTINA: Yeah, that's fingers crossed that I will be able to catch up on my TBR.

ANNE: Do you read solely romance, Kristina?

[00:13:24] KRISTINA: I would say about 95% of what I read is romance. I read different subgenres of romance. I will sometimes read sci-fi. I will read historical, like I said I'll read contemporary. And then I'll read rom-com. I think there's a difference between a contemporary romance and a romantic comedy. But then occasionally, I do... I also read historical fiction.

There are a few authors who I really love. I love Sadeqa Johnson, Yellow Wife and House of Eve. Those are two of my favorite books. And then I also do read literary fiction. I love Brit Bennett. Her book, The Mothers, is one of my favorite books of all time. I'm looking forward to reading Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray, Kin by Tayari Jones. These are books that I bought when they came out, and I'm just waiting for the chance to be able to read them when I meet all of my deadlines. So, yeah, majority of what I read is romance, though.

ANNE: Well, you said nothing holds your attention like a romance.

KRISTINA: Yeah, yeah.

[00:14:23] ANNE: Which may speak to what your personal reading does for you. I'd love to hear more about what reading means to you or what role it fills in your life, whatever direction you want to take that.

KRISTINA: A question that I feel like I get asked a lot or that authors get asked a lot is like, "What are your favorite hobbies?" And the only one I can ever really say is reading. And it always, I'm like, "Oh, does that sound boring because I'm an author? Of course, I'm going to say reading." But it really is my number one hobby.

When I am not reading a good book, I feel off, and I don't know if you feel this way, too, because I know that you read a lot, or if the people listening feel that way. But if too many weeks have gone by where I haven't read a book, and this sometimes happens when I'm on deadline, I'm just so locked in that I can't immerse myself in the works of someone else, I start to feel really like something isn't right.

[00:15:22] I love reading good books. I love being immersed in other people's art, and reading brings me joy, and it feels like a safe space. And I feel happiest when, of course, things are going well in my personal life, but also when I'm reading a really good book. It makes me excited. It makes me excited about literature. I love seeing how people respond to a book that I've read and really liked too, you know, in the reader community.

I think that reading creates a sense of connection also because I think we tend to be... readers tend to be introverted people. I know. I describe myself as an extroverted introvert. I'm naturally introverted, but I can be extroverted if I need to be. But I think that what brings us all together is that we love to be immersed in the pages of a fictional story or nonfiction if people prefer to read nonfiction. But it really is my favorite hobby. It's what I really love to do in my spare time.

[00:16:31] ANNE: Well, I relate to that. I feel restless when I'm not in the middle of a good book or when I don't have one on deck that I just can't wait to get into. I like to know there's a book, a specific book and story experience waiting for me when I'm ready for it, at all times really. I'm realizing as I listen to you talk about this.

KRISTINA: Yes, yes. I agree with that.

ANNE: Kristina, with your past books being published in February, The Summer Girlfriend coming out in June is a change, I'm thinking that's maybe not a coincidence.

KRISTINA: Yeah, no, very, very strategic to have this book come out at the beginning of summer.

ANNE: Well, I'd love to hear more about writing a beach read in all the senses.

KRISTINA: Yes. I really was just thinking about all of my memories and old current of spending summers at the beach in New Jersey, particularly Wildwood Beach, which is where we went every summer. It's also where we went after prom. I think that might be a New Jersey-specific thing. I don't know if other states have this, especially if you don't have a beach.

[00:17:47] But in high school after prom, we would spend the weekend at Wildwood. Like everybody would go. You would get hotel rooms, or some people had like beach houses or whatever, but we would spend the weekend at Wildwood. That felt quintessential to my youth.

My parents used to drive us to Wildwood Beach. You know, we would sometimes go for the day, sometimes go for a few days. Wildwood has this huge boardwalk and along the boardwalk, there's places where you can get funnel cake and fried Oreo. Literally, you can get anything imaginable fried in dough and covered in powdered sugar. It's there at these places. And these huge slices of pizza, these huge cartons of lemonade, and it's so sugary and sweet, salt water taffy, and the different sections of the boardwalk that has games and rides. It's just so much going on.

[00:18:43] And the beach itself is really long. The point of when you get off the boardwalk to walk to the actual shore, oh my gosh, that always feels like the longest walk in the world, especially if the sand is hot, and you're just trying to run and get to the wet sand as fast as you can because your feet are burning.

These were just like very clear memories in my mind, and I wanted to put that onto the page so that when people read The Summer Girlfriend, they would feel like, "Ah, this is what it means to be at the beach in New Jersey for the summer."

And the smell. The smell of the saltwater is just everywhere, and the seagulls calling to each other and also bothering you. Like the minute they smell food, they are right in front of you. So I was just trying to capture all of those memories when I was drafting.

[00:19:41] ANNE: Oh, I'm so jealous. You were singing the praises of New Jersey beaches before we hit record on this conversation. I love where I live, except I'm incredibly jealous that I'm like 600 miles from the ocean. And no citizen of New Jersey is that far away.

KRISTINA: Yeah, no. Yeah, we're lucky.

ANNE: I would love to hear more about the specific story setting of The Summer Girlfriend, but first could we zoom out for a moment?

KRISTINA: Yeah.

ANNE: Kristina, could you just give our readers a sense of what the book is about?

KRISTINA: So, The Summer Girlfriend is about a woman named Noelle who is saving up to go back to college. She had to drop out when she was originally in college when she was a teenager, and she wants to get her master's degree and become a librarian. But she's just been let go of her main job as a bookseller. She also has a side hustle as a bridesmaid for hire.

And she happens to meet a young man named Jeremiah who is wealthy. He's the heir to a baked goods company, and he is in need of a fake girlfriend for the summer at his family's beach house in the town called Heart Beach. And so they decide to fake date for the summer. He'll pay her to be his pretend girlfriend, and then she'll get the money for college. But not actually falling in love while pretending to be in a relationship is a lot easier said than done.

[00:20:57] ANNE: I enjoyed all the details so much. Okay, but I'm not going to get distracted right now. Let's go back to the story world. In the book's prologue, I think it's set in 1974 and we hear a little bit of the history of Heart Beach and this one specific house that comes into the protagonist's family. I mean, this was a whole new world to me.

The tone is so wistful, and you know as a reader this is the origin story for this house and this place that is going to come to mean so much to this family that we're reading about it in the present-day storyline 50 years later. But also, the way you describe Heart Beach is so fascinating. I loved hearing the details and history, and is... I was wondering if it's based on a real place. Perhaps you just hinted at that.

[00:21:44] KRISTINA: Yeah. There are actually a few inspirations for Heart Beach other than beaches like Wildwood and Ocean City, which is where I went growing up. Heart Beach was founded by a Black couple. And that was inspired by the history of Bruce's Beach in California, which is a part of Manhattan Beach.

Bruce's Beach was founded in the early 1900s. It sounds so weird to say the early 1900s, but it was founded in the early 1900s by this Bruce couple. They'd moved to California during the Great Migration, and they purchased a plot of land and turned it into a seaside resort that was welcoming to Black beachgoers because not all beaches were welcoming to Black people at the time. And it became a very popular attraction for Black people.

But the people in the predominantly White surrounding area were not happy with this. And because there was so much pushback from the people in the surrounding area, the Manhattan Beach Council voted to condemn Bruce's Beach. Then the land was unlawfully seized and the resort was demolished.

[00:22:52] It was a few years ago that the land was finally returned to the descendants, but they ended up selling it back to the county for about $20 million, and they decided to use that money to finally build some generational wealth within their family.

But I kept thinking, "What if that hadn't happened to this family? What if they were able to keep this land and to continue to be allowed to have this be a beautiful resort where Black people were buying homes and where they came to vacation?" And there's also Chicken Bone Beach in New Jersey, which was a Black beach in New Jersey during segregation.

So the history of those different beaches went into Heart Beach as well. I hint on that a little bit in the prologue when they're talking about the history of how the town started but also the particular house. I was intentional with starting the prologue by describing the house because I feel like Heart Beach is a character in itself in the novel. It's the place where everyone always comes back to.

[00:23:58] The heart of the story, of course, is the relationship between Noelle and Jeremiah, but then the broader heart of the story is this house in Heart Beach and how hard Jeremiah's grandparents worked to be able to buy this house and what that meant to them to be able to have a beach house that they could vacation at in the 1970s and how they've continued to keep this house in their family and how multiple generations have walked through the front doors.

It's especially because I think generational wealth is such a hard thing for Black people to be able to get and then attain in this country. And so I really wanted to write about that and to write about this family who they really love each other, but that the house is a reflection of that love and how the house has been expanded over the years in the same way that the family has expanded over the years.

[00:24:55] But it's where everyone comes back to every summer. They are here in Heart Beach, which is why it's a point of contention for Jeremiah, because he's been avoiding the house in Heart Beach after he had an argument with his grandfather before his grandfather passed away. He feels a lot of guilt over that argument, and so he's been avoiding this house, which also means so much to him. And so it kind of is eating him up inside that he feels as though he can't go back because of the bad memory that he has there.

ANNE: I love how you describe the house as being a character in its own right. And it does feel so warm and welcoming. I mean, some books are, in part, enjoyable to read because you want to spend time in the world they're set in, and I wanted to be at that house.

KRISTINA: Oh, good. I'm really glad to hear that.

[00:25:44] ANNE: I love how we see the legacy of the home and the generational wealth in this Black family. And also the recipes were passed down through the generations as well. This story is... I mean, I really enjoyed reading about the family business, but also it's a family business that makes baked goods. And something I've learned about myself is I like to read about things that taste good. I'd love to hear anything you have to say about legacy or sweets.

KRISTINA: That was inspired by my grandmother. We were very close. She passed away two years ago. So the relationship between Jeremiah and Pop, who's his grandfather, was sort of inspired by how close I was with my grandmother. She was like a second mom to me. And she made the most amazing pound cake. It's a secret. I know the recipe, my mom knows the recipe, but that's it. And we don't tell anyone because we're like, "If we're ever in dire straits, we can make that pound cake and sell it."

[00:26:48] It's literally what we keep in our back pocket. Like, if we ever need to figure out a way to make money, we will start selling that pound cake. And it's the cake that my friends... whenever someone's having a baby or they're moving or some kind of exciting life thing is happening, my friends text me like, "Does this mean I can get a pound cake?" At holidays they're like, "Are you making the pound cake this year?"

And it's just like everyone loves this pound cake. And because it was my grandmother's recipe, and I was thinking a lot about how I was... I remember being so young and standing next to her at the kitchen counter while she whipped the batter. And she would only let me eat a little tiny spoonful because she said I couldn't eat the raw eggs. And I was always so disappointed by that because the batter of this pound cake is... it's honestly my favorite part of making a pound cake is when I can eat the batter.

[00:27:45] I just have these memories of helping her to whip the cake. And she was a little woman, and I remember watching her with her little tiny arm whip all this thick batter and being so fascinated by how she did it so perfectly, that she would make drop cookies and pies and everything from scratch.

My grandmother, she really was kind of grandmother from a storybook. We would come home from school, and she would have cookies, and my friends would always want to come over and be like, "Did your grandmom bake?" You know? She would make lemonade fresh. She was an amazing woman.

The three of us, me, my mom, and my grandmother had this joke that we would one day start selling those poundcakes. So when I was thinking about what the Smith family would be known for, what their legacy would be, I thought, "Oh, poundcakes." It starts with his grandfather making a poundcake for his wife, and then from there he's like, "Well, what else can I bake?" That was inspired by my own relationship with my mom and my grandmom, and how much we all love to bake, and all the secret recipes that we have.

[00:29:00] ANNE: Oh, that sounds amazing. My mom always talked about her grandmother's baking as well. That it was incredibly delicious, but the ugliest baked good you had ever seen. I'm not sure they were Smith's Sweets material.

Now, many readers will not be sad to discover the book that they're reading features a library or a bookstore. We kind of get a twofer with The Summer Girlfriend. Would you say more about that? I especially loved your bookstore's name in the book.

KRISTINA: Oh, thank you. Noelle, at the beginning of the novel, she works at a place called Hidden Gems Books. Particularly it's a used bookstore, hence the name Hidden Gems. And her boss, Harold, is lovingly curmudgeonly, but he's very strict on we only sell used books. And I believe that's what he says is, "People need to read about what came before before they read new things."

[00:29:53] And even though Noelle's like, "We need to sell new books in order to keep people wanting to come to the store," and just because a lot of the time the big best sellers are the ones that are driving the revenue. But he's very, very solid in the fact that he only wants to sell older used books at the store. So that's where that name came from. Then also Heart Beach Books is the bookstore in Heart Beach. That name is just... you know, there's only one bookstore in Heart Beach, so it's called Heart Beach Books.

But yes, Noelle is a book lover, and she discovered a love for reading after she had to drop out of college and her mom was going through some health struggles. She found reading, and she found reading to be a safe space. I think the way that many of us come to reading or the “what” we love about reading is that it provides an escape.

[00:30:45] And she just became a very avid reader, and she had a very wonderful interaction with a librarian who took her around the library and just gave her a bunch of recommendations. And she realized that she wanted to be able to be that person for someone else who was going through a hard time and was shown kindness and patience and was provided with a bunch of really good books to read to help her get through a tough time in her life. So that becomes her goal. She loves to read, but she also wants to share the love of reading with other people.

ANNE: I love that. Kristina, you were saying that Noelle was largely inspired by your student loans. Do I have that right?

KRISTINA: Yes. I just have a lot of student loans, because I went to grad school in New York City. And I remember thinking... and this was early on of when I was in the preliminary stages of thinking of the idea of The Summer Girlfriend, of fleshing it out. And I thought, "Ugh, I wish somebody would just come along and give me a bunch of money." You know? "I wish someone would just come along and pay off those loans for me."

[00:31:56] And then I thought about Jeremiah. Like, wouldn't it be lovely if you knew some guy who was handsome and kind, and... you know, of course, he's not perfect. He's got his own emotional wounds going on. But if he came up to you and was like, "You don't have to do anything. I'll just pay off your loans for you."

So that's sort of what ends up happening to Noelle. He's like, "I will pay your remaining tuition if you come to my family's beach house with me and pretend to be my girlfriend for the summer." And she's like, "Oh, gosh, so hard. You're so hot. Of course I'll do it," you know? It's not hard money to make. But that was the inspiration is just thinking about the student loans that I currently owe.

ANNE: Well, I enjoyed reading about that and her summer at Heart Beach. Kristina, for those heading to the beach themselves this summer, or for those who are not heading to the beach and really wish they were, I'd love to hear about some of your favorite beach reads.

[00:32:57] KRISTINA: Yes, of course. So my first recommendation is going to be a novel called Only for the Week, and this is by Natasha Bishop.

ANNE: Oh, I don't know this.

KRISTINA: This is a romance novel, and is a true beach read because it takes place in Tulum, Mexico. A woman named Janelle is in Mexico for her sister's wedding. She's the maid of honor. But the twist is that her sister is actually getting married to her ex-boyfriend who she broke up with years ago. She doesn't care about him anymore, but there's tension there, of course, that her sister ended up dating her ex.

But she ends up getting in a very flirtatious situation with the best man, who is, of course, the groom's best friend. So it's a lot of messy drama between those four people. But they decide that they are only going to be in a very short fling for the week that they're in Mexico. But of course, when you decide that, you know, we're only going to be together for this limited period of time, things don't always end up like that.

[00:33:59] My other recommendation is a novel called Curvy Girl Summer by an author named Danielle Allen. This is a novel about a woman named Aaliyah who is determined to find a boyfriend by the end of the summer where she's having her big 30th birthday party. So she goes on a series of dates, trying to find different guys who could be the potential boyfriend to bring to this party.

And she goes on all of her dates at the same bar. And she ends up striking up a very interesting friendship with a very cute bartender, and it turns out that the person who might be the best boyfriend for her could have been in front of her the whole time.

So those are two that I off the bat recommend because they take place during summer and have very summery feeling, perfect for the beach. This is a book that published earlier this year. It's called One and Only by Maurene Goo.

[00:34:56] Maurene is another author who started out writing YA and who is now writing... I would say One and Only toes that line between women's fiction and romance. But this is a story about a woman who... she's Korean American, and in her family they have the secret magical gift of being able to read into people's past lives and discovering who their soulmates are. So that's how they make their living. No one knows how it's done, but people pay a lot of money for them to figure out who their soulmates are.

And she is nearing her 40th birthday and she knows her soulmate's name, but she still has not met him. And she ends up falling for someone who's a little bit younger than her. But then it turns out that the person whose name is on the note for her soulmate is this guy's boss. So she ends up in this very interesting love triangle between the younger guy that she likes and then his boss, who she also really likes.

[00:36:00] This was the first novel that I've read in a long time that had a love triangle, but really I genuinely did not know how it was going to end. And I thought that was really refreshing. I really love Maurene's books. So those are three novels that I highly recommend people take to the beach this summer.

ANNE: Ooh, thank you. What's the best book you've read this year?

KRISTINA: I loved every book that I read this year. Oh, One and Only. I would say One and Only probably. That was probably my favorite book. Another book that I really loved this year was Keeper of Lost Children by Sadeqa Johnson. I had mentioned her before. She writes historical fiction.

This novel talks about a little-known history of mixed-race children in Germany post-World War II and how there was a woman who was a wife to a soldier who was stationed in Germany, and how she discovered this orphanage filled with mixed-race children, and this is usually from Black men who were stationed in Germany but then weren't allowed to marry the German women that they met or for various different reasons the children were given up. And she worked to get these children adopted by couples in the United States. A very interesting, you know, multiple perspectives. That was also a really good novel.

[00:37:23] ANNE: Yeah, I really enjoyed that myself.

KRISTINA: Oh, you read it, too?

ANNE: Yeah, yeah.

KRISTINA: Okay, perfect.

ANNE: I really like her. And Kristina, what's one book that you're really excited about reading this summer, high on your priority list?

KRISTINA: Oh, gosh. I would definitely say Score by Kennedy Ryan. This is book two in her... oh, gosh, I'm blanking on the name of the series. But the first book is called Real, and that's one of my favorite romance novels. Essentially, the series is about a group of creatives who are coming together to make a biopic about a woman named Dessie Blue who was a Harlem Renaissance figure.

The first book is about the director who falls in love with the lead actress, and Score is about the screenwriter and the man who's making the score for the novel. I know that there's an actual title for that job, but I'm just blanking right now. I'm thinking score creator. I know that's not right. But it's a romance between the two of them. It's a second-chance romance, because they had dated previously in college, and now they're working on this film together.

[00:38:27] KRISTINA: I loved Reel and so Score is definitely high up on my list to read once I hand in this next book.

ANNE: That's good motivation. Kristina, thank you so much for talking books with me today. Is there anything else you want to tell our listeners?

KRISTINA: Thank you so much for having me. I guess what else I would like to say is that I hope that if you read The Summer Girlfriend, that it feels like a wonderful beachy read, even if you're not at the beach, and you're just reading on your lunch break at work. I hope it transports you to a beachy, summery environment.

ANNE: I mean, I love to take a good book to the beach, but also a good book can take you anywhere.

KRISTINA: Yes, I agree.

ANNE: Amazing. Well, we wish you well as you go out into the world to talk with readers in person so often about the book, and hope you have your best reading summer.

KRISTINA: Thank you so much.

[00:39:25] ANNE: Hey, readers. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Kristina, and I'd love to hear what you think she should read next. Find Kristina at her website, Kristinaforest.com, as well as on Instagram. And we have all those links and the full list of titles we talked about today at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com.

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[00:40:12] Thanks to the people who make this show happen. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by executive producer Will Bogel, Media production specialist Holly Wielkoszewski, social media manager and editor Leigh Kramer, community coordinator Brigid Misselhorn, community manager Shannan Malone, and our whole team at What Should I Read Next? and Modern Mrs. Darcy HQ. Plus the audio whizzes at Studio D Podcast Production.

Readers, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And as Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading." Happy reading, everyone.