Quick Take
- Narration: Natalie Naudus gives Lara a voice that’s both earnest and self-aware, the right combination for a protagonist navigating something she doesn’t yet have language for.
- Themes: bisexual self-discovery, high school social performance, the tension between want and identity
- Mood: Warm and witty with real emotional undercurrents
- Verdict: A sharper and more emotionally honest coming-of-age story than its fizzy surface suggests, with character work that rewards readers who give it full attention.
I picked this one up expecting it to be pleasant and lightweight, the kind of story that passes a few hours comfortably without asking much. Dahlia Adler’s Cool for the Summer is something closer to the opposite. It has the architecture of a breezy YA romance and uses that architecture to do something considerably more careful. I found myself actually surprised by how much it accumulated as I listened, particularly in the character relationships that, on the surface, look like the standard furniture of high school fiction but turn out to be doing precise work.
Lara has had a three-year crush on Chase Harding: football star, genuinely kind, and by her own description stupid hot. When he starts paying attention to her in their senior year, everything she’s wanted seems to be arriving on schedule. Except for Jasmine, who spent the previous summer with Lara in a way that was confusing and romantic and something Lara hasn’t fully processed. And now Jasmine is walking through the front doors of Lara’s school, directly into her sightline as she’s chatting with Chase in front of the lockers. What follows is not a straightforward love triangle but something considerably messier and more true to life.
Our Take on Cool for the Summer
The bisexual identity arc here is the book’s most important achievement, and Adler handles it with a precision that goes well beyond the standard coming-out narrative. Lara isn’t a character who knows she’s bisexual and is hiding it from herself or others. She’s a character who genuinely doesn’t have a framework for what the summer with Jasmine meant. Her internal processing has the texture of real confusion rather than performed uncertainty, and the simultaneous presence of Chase, who she still genuinely is attracted to, and Jasmine, who she can’t stop thinking about, creates a triangle that asks real questions rather than setting up an obvious answer.
The novel uses dual timelines, the present senior year and the previous summer with Jasmine, to build its revelation at the right pace. One reviewer praised this structure for giving away just enough to keep the story moving. I’d go further: the parallel construction is the book’s most technically accomplished feature, and it’s the reason the emotional payoff lands as well as it does. Each timeline is doing work the other couldn’t do alone, and the construction rewards close attention.
Why Listen to Cool for the Summer
Natalie Naudus is well-cast here. Lara is a narrator who is simultaneously more self-aware than she thinks she is and less self-aware than the reader can see, and maintaining that gap without tipping into either false sophistication or false naivety is a narration challenge. Naudus threads it consistently. Her voice has a naturalistic quality that keeps the social dynamics and the emotional processing in the same register, which matters in a book that’s asking you to take a high school romance seriously as a vehicle for real questions about identity and desire.
Macmillan Audio’s production is polished and the six-and-a-half-hour runtime is well-paced. This is a single-sitting audiobook for many listeners, the kind of story that catches you mid-commute and keeps pulling until you’re home and still in the car. The timing of each revelation is calibrated for the audio format, and Naudus’s investment in the material keeps the emotional stakes present across the full runtime.
What to Watch For in Cool for the Summer
The characters around Lara get a fair amount of critical attention in reader responses. Chase is specifically the subject of complicated feelings. He’s written as genuinely kind and not villainous, which makes the love triangle’s resolution harder to dismiss as simple. One reviewer noted that his basic decency made him harder to dislike than expected, which is precisely the point. Adler isn’t interested in making this easy by giving Lara an obvious out.
Shannon, Lara’s best friend, generates divided reactions. Some readers find her warm and well-drawn; others find her social dynamics with Lara a bit thorny. The friend-group dynamics are more carefully rendered than they initially appear, and the home-life details that several reviewers mentioned appreciating are threaded throughout. This isn’t a story that forgets its characters have families and histories outside the central plot, and that fullness of world is part of what elevates it above the genre’s usual level.
Who Should Listen to Cool for the Summer
Readers who remember what it actually felt like to not know what you wanted, or to want incompatible things simultaneously, will find this a more resonant experience than the genre’s surface might suggest. It is a YA contemporary romance with a bisexual protagonist, and it takes both the romance and the bisexual identity seriously on their own terms rather than using one to resolve the other.
The book’s lasting contribution may be in how it handles the period of not-knowing rather than the moment of self-recognition. Most bisexual narratives in YA are structured around a revelation moment: the character finally understands what they are. Cool for the Summer is more interested in the extended, uncomfortable time before that moment, when the evidence is present but the framework for understanding it is missing. That is a harder story to tell, because it requires the author to resist the satisfaction of early clarity, and Adler resists it well across the full runtime.
Listeners who want a clean and uncomplicated love story with a clearly defined good and bad option may find the ambiguity unsatisfying. The book doesn’t give you the release valve of a villain, and the emotional complexity is the product rather than a side effect. Becky Albertalli’s blurb describing it as witty, wise, and disarmingly tender is an accurate description, if perhaps underselling how quietly demanding the book is. It asks you to hold contradictory feelings alongside its protagonist, and the readers who are willing to do that find it lingers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Cool for the Summer an accurate representation of bisexual identity, or is it simplified for a YA audience?
Most LGBTQ+ readers and reviewers consider it one of the more honest treatments of bisexual experience in YA, specifically because Lara doesn’t know she’s bisexual for much of the story and her confusion is written as genuine rather than performed. The confusion is the point, not the obstacle.
Does the dual-timeline structure (senior year and the previous summer) work well in audio format?
Yes, largely because Natalie Naudus’s narration keeps the emotional register consistent between timelines and Adler’s prose markers are clear enough that listeners can track which period they’re in. The structure is actually one of the book’s greatest assets in audio form.
How does Chase work as a love interest given that the book ultimately centers Jasmine?
Chase is deliberately written without obvious flaws, which makes him more interesting than a conventional romantic foil. He’s kind, he’s genuine, and his presence complicates the resolution in productive ways. Whether his handling feels earned or frustrating tends to divide readers, but Adler’s choice is clearly intentional.
Is this appropriate for younger YA readers, or is the content more mature?
The content is appropriate for high school readers and above. The mature elements are emotional rather than explicit. The book deals seriously with sexual identity and relationship complexity, but there’s no graphic content. It’s firmly within the YA genre’s standard range.
