This was an ok book, the beginning didn't grab me and I then found it quite difficult to be interested in the characters who seemed a bit clichéd at times, and the parallels with Epstein were clear. Having said that it was well written and an easy read if a difficult topic.
Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book.

This is a difficult book to review. I cannot truthfully say I enjoyed it, dealing, as it does with a dark topic reminiscent of Jeffrey Epstein or Hugh Hefner tales. Rachel goes on holiday just before she is due to start university and she and her friend find themselves on a small Greek island. They manage to find work and they play as hard as they work.
The tale is told in alternate chapters of ‘Then’ and ‘Now’ as Rachel, now married goes on holiday to the same island with her husband and once again begins to think about Alistair, the older man she met and fell in love with as a teenager.
It’s not an easy read and as an older wiser woman, it’s easy to get frustrated with Rachel’s naivety and poor judgement, but you could see how easily these young girls were sucked in to a party lifestyle. Having said that, Rachel was still showing lack of judgement in her 30’s
I found the book slow at times, one of the reasons why I have only given three stars. The book is well written but as I read for pleasure and I didn’t get much pleasure out of it, I couldn’t award it with any more.
My thanks go to the author, the publishers and NetGalley for an advanced e.reader copy of this book, however this review is entirely voluntary and is my honest opinion.

The Girls Of Summer
The descriptions of the island are absolutely beautiful and the author captures the essence of the first summer of freedom perfectly. The naivety of a lot of the female characters and the self assurance of the male characters is definitely accurate for the time setting of this story.
Rachel heads off to travel through Greece and the Greek islands the summer after her GCSEs with her best friend Caroline. When their adventure takes them to a remote and quiet island they soon find themselves absorbed in a bubble of working hard and playing harder.
They meet a group of girls and befriend them. The girls work in a bar on the island and it’s at this bar that Rachel meets Alastair. He is handsome, assured and at almost twice Rachel’s age he is unlike any of the teenage boys 17 year old Rachel knows from back home. Rachel falls in love almost immediately. So when it’s time for them to fly home and start sixth form, Rachel decides she’s not going. She’s going to stay and work in the bar and be with Alistair.
But life on the island isn’t all it seems.
Years later Rachel and her husband Tom are back on the island on holiday. They visit the bar and Rachel slowly starts to wonder if her rose tinted memories are all they seem.

Further into the book things get a lot darker and I don’t know want to give anything away but I found some of it quite hard to read.

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC

This is such a thought provoking book with some Heart wrenching/ Heartbreaking topics that I found hard to read or times but it was so worth it!

Please buy this book you won’t regret it

A readable if cliched novel, with a plot which resembles the recent Jeffrey Epstein. scandal. If I had one quibble, it would be that 'The Girls of Summer' drags a bit in the middle, and the main character’s selfishness/naïveté grates a little bit. You do wonder what she sees in Alastair, a man who written to have all the personality of a cold kebab (and who turns out to be a wrong’un. This isn’t a spoiler, btw, as it’s pretty easy to guess this from the first page.)

Rachel was seventeen, going on eighteen, when she travelled to Greece with her friend before going back to college. Then she discovered a small island off the mainland that entranced her, including the people living and working there. This story takes you through her time on the island whilst revisiting the present day where she is married to Tom and we discover how both times in her life are now connected.

This was a great story and I loved the different time periods throughout, they blended really well together. Some heavy themes are touched in throughout but I felt were handled sensitively and really added to the story which was written beautifully.

I give this a 4.5 star rating as I just didn’t click with Rachel, I feel if I did this would have torn my heart in two. Truly so well written.

This was an enjoyable summer read, and I loved the Greek island setting, and could relate to 17 year old Rachel getting swept away by the exotic lifestyle she was presented with.

I found present day Rachel a bit less convincing, and the ending did drag somewhat.

Overall a good beach read!

A beautifully written book. I thoroughly enjoyed the setting and could almost feel the sun on my skin. But then I started to realise that this tale was taking a very dark and uncomfortable turn. The innocence and excitement of youth quickly started to feel like exploitation. It was interesting to see how the main character began to realise that things had not been quite as idyllic as she remembered. A lush but ultimately uncomfortable book for our times.

Rachel is a 34 year old woman, respectable job, a best friend, a loving husband. Rachel isn't happy thoug,h, this isn't the life that she should be living. Sixteen years earlier she had been a backpacker arriving on a Greek island, she got a job working in a bar, and then as a hostess at private parties. Rachel was living the dream, moving from shy teenager to confident adult, and falling in love with one of the most influential men on the island. The problem is, when you see the world through Rose coloured glasses, all of the red flags just look like flags.....An excellent summer read, perfect for the beach!

This was not an easy novel to read, starting out okay before turning fairly dark and uncomfortable.

Not an easy read but in today's age, definitely an important one.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy of this in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this, it was well written, topical and an interesting read given news in recent years. I do feel there were areas where too much detail was given and others where too little was! And there were a couple of small plot holes that did throw me slightly but overall this was a really good, if difficult at times, read.

This book started off being an easy to read twin timeline story of Rachel now and the summer she turned 18, it started to hint at some dark themes around the edges of that past time which our narrator didn't seem aware of herself either.

I guess this shows how flawed our human experience is, we only see what we see and most times it's not the full story of what has happened around us. This is compounded when there is some form of bias via emotion involved as well which means we can ignore some behaviours or explain them to ourselves in harmless ways.

This is one of those books where you wonder what you would have done in the situations described and hope that it's not still happening somewhere out there .....

It's a good, thought provoking read that needs to be discussed far and wide!

The Girls of Summer is a well written book set in two time zones. Then, 15 years ago on a Greek Island and Now, present day UK. We follow Rachel's story as a teenager on the island one summer and how it has mapped and shaped her adult life. A good debut novel worthy of 4 stars and one I recommend you put on your reading list. Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and author for an arc of this book.

I read The Girls of Summer over a couple of days and whilst I liked it, I didn’t love it. The premise had me hooked and I had great expectations for this novel however I found vast sections of the book dragged. It had me hooked enough to keep reading hence the three stars but I was disappointed by it. Thank you to NetGalley, Random House UK Transworld Publishers and the author for the chance to review.

A dark story which at times wasn’t easy to read due to the nature of it, but I felt connected to the characters and drawn in which kept me invested in the sorry

Life on the island seems idyllic and why wouldn't you want to hang around in the sun when you've got an easy job and accommodation paid for. This is how Rachel sees her summer panning out as a 17yr old not wanting to go back to A-Levels. And when she meets the charismatic Alistair then why would she want to leave? 16yrs later we get to see where Rachel is, and the effect of the summer when she was 17, and was it really as idyllic as she thought?

I sped through this book, loved the reassurance of a 'then' and 'now' chapter, kept you wondering what was next but you knew you didn't have too long before you found out the next step. I got Jeffrey Epstein vibes and creeped out by the storyline as it unfolded. I didn't warm to Rachel but I think that was the point, she didn't like herself so why would I like her? I felt I didn't know too much about the other girls and wondered if that was intentional or not.

A couple of things bugged me, why was Henry Taylor always called Henry Taylor? No-one else was referred to by their full name all the time and I found it really distracting as I thought - you've introduced him, we know who he is, just call him Henry?! And also the friendship with Jules was a little overambitious, would a friend you met on holiday really be as kind and accommodating as she is?

Katie Bishop manages to conjure up sun-soaked holidays of teenagers really well in her first novel, "The Girls of Summer". We follow Rachel and Caroline to a Greek island where they find the cheapest accommodation, a bunch of girls and spend the most amazing few weeks. Rachel stays on, finding work in a bar and moving into a shared house with some girls. Her secret romance with Alistair is what keeps her there. 16 years on, she thinks she has moved on but then the past catches up with her and she sees what was considered fun and edgy, might have been more sinister. A great first novel for the #MeToo generation.

— 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 —

𝐓𝐢𝐭𝐥𝐞: The Girls of Summer
𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬: N/A
𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫(𝐬): Katie Bishop
𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐞: Contemporary
𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐏𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐝: 25th May 2023
𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠: 4.25/5

This had such interesting insight into the #MeToo movement since it’s from a victims point of view, but one who doesn’t see herself as a victim until later in life and even then, doesn’t think of herself as the victim so much as the perpetrator the newly discovered villain.

This does contain a certain amount of uncomfortable manipulation of a seventeen year old girl from a man who is in his thirties on behalf of an older man. Rape and sexual assault occurs in this book and is also justified by the main character before the character is able to develop herself away from the trauma. It sounds horrible typing that its justified by the main character but it is clearly demonstrated how this is more of a trauma response than a condoning.

To be honest, this book read like a car crash I couldn’t look away from. It was wildly uncomfortable and yet compelling too. All throughout, I could not stop thinking about Epstein Island and the carnage, chaos and abuse that surrounds it.

This won’t be for everyone, but I enjoyed the character development as it was something I was invested in from the very start due to the clearly demonstrated naïveté of the main character. The sadness felt very poignant in this read and it was so easy to see how hard being a sexual abuse survivor is.

𝑲𝒂𝒚𝒍𝒆𝒊𝒈𝒉 @ 𝑾𝒆𝒍𝒔𝒉 𝑩𝒐𝒐𝒌 𝑭𝒂𝒊𝒓𝒚
🧚‍♀️🤍

Girls of Summer was full of gorgeous prose. It made me long for the Greek Islands. I loved the scenerary. Obviously there was a dark undertone which was very sad.

I hated nearly all the choices Rachel made. It made me despise her which at times made me want to quit. Maybe this one just wasn't for me.

Overall, a very solid debut novel. I found myself taken in by the first half of this book, but lost interest along the way. The description of this book was intriguing, however my conclusion is that its difficult subject matter needed a stronger voice and more likeable characters to carry it.