torybuckley 's review for:

The Summer Pact by Emily Giffin

1.0

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You guys, this book was so hard for me to finish. Not just because I’m in law school and have kids but because I literally had to force myself to finish it even when I was down to only 70 pages. I’ve loved all of Emily’s past books and this one just wasn’t for me. It seems like she wanted to write a book about her feelings on politics (which we are completely aligned) and then she tried to stuff it into the 4 corners of a romance novel about friendship with a token black friend who she also wrote for, in first person, as a white woman. Tyson’s character was completely out of place to me, it was clumsy and awkward. The scene where he explains to his friends of 20 years that he can’t just go knocking on doors in a white neighborhood in Texas… ICK. If they were truly his friends they wouldn’t have needed to be reminded throughout the book that things for him were different in society. They would just know. It honestly made me question how Emily got this book approved and then I remembered it’s likely because everyone around her reading this and thinking it was so profound and woke was probably a white woman from the suburbs, or a white woman in a tall building in NYC who thought “omg this is exactly what we need right now, a story about a group of 3 white women and a black man who are all besties!”