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Carley Fortune's Our Perfect Storm totally got me out of a reading slump — I read it faster than I'd read any book in a year, thanks to how sensory the writing is, and how engrossed I was with the friends-to-something-more tension. And if you're a fan of Every Summer After and This Summer Will Be Different, then this is the book for you.
"I feel like this is my most sweeping love story," Carley shares with Brit + Co. "It is, I think, my most intense story, and maybe it's because the characters have known each other since childhood. I think it's my best; I felt something special happening when I was writing it. It's a bit moodier, I think, than my other books. It feels very much like a Carley Fortune novel. You're transported somewhere beautiful, and it's a love story. There's a relationship between women that's really important, but I think it offers a bit of a stormier book, really."
Here's what Carley Fortune revealed about her new book Our Perfect Storm.
'Our Perfect Storm' is the perfect homage to 'Little Women'.
Anyone who can't get enough of the friends-to-lovers trope has probably had at least one conversation Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, and whether Laurie and Jo should have ended up together. For her part, Carley Fortune definitely wishes they'd tied the knot — in fact, when she used to watch the 1994 version (starring Winona Ryder and Christian Bale), she'd stop the movie halfway through.
"I would sometimes watch it up until the point where Jo refuses Laurie's proposal and then shut it off. I was so upset," she says. "I really wanted them to be together, and the idea in the book and in the film is that they're too similar for it to work out, and that they would kill each other. I thought, well, what if that dynamic could work? What does that look like? It's not a retelling of Little Women at all, but there are little Easter eggs to it. The book and film is a reference for the characters. I listened to that orchestral soundtrack while I was writing, and it was just such a nice way to pay homage to Little Women."
"I did that for This Summer Will Be Different," she continues. "My third novel is such an homage to Anne of Green Gables, which is one of my number one influences to be honest, and it just felt so lovely to be able to pay tribute to Louisa May Alcott in that story."
And Frankie is unlike any of Carley Fortune's other leads.
Carley Fortune set out to make the main character, Frankie, different than any of her previous characters. "I always want to find a character who is different than my previous protagonist. So in One Golden Summer, Alice is strong, but she's softer. She puts everybody ahead of herself. She's a caregiver, she prefers to be the background. And I wanted Frankie to be much more hotheaded," she says. "I also wanted to write about two people who are so similar to each other, and I felt like I hadn't before."
And if you want to publish a book, Carley Fortune has writing advice for you.
Rob Tarleton/Brit + Co
If you're dreaming of writing your first novel, Carley Fortune has some advice: just do it.
"I wrote Every Summer After basically between the hours of 5 and 6 a.m. before my son woke up, before I started my job. And I did it for myself. I didn't even intend on publishing it. I just fell in love with writing," she says. "I wanted to show myself that I could write a book and I had so much joy in it. And it was so wonderful, doing something for me. And where it wasn't for an employer or it wasn't for anything except for the joy of it, and I wanted to create the thing that I wanted to read. And the other thing was, I set a deadline and a daily word count goal, and I stuck to it. And I just assumed that I would have a rough draft, and that would be okay. And I think making that commitment to yourself and carving up that space to like play and do the thing is so important."
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