Carley Fortune has quickly become Canada’s reigning queen of the summer love story — and Meet Me at the Lake cements her crown. Set against the sun-dappled backdrop of Muskoka’s lakes and the nostalgia-soaked air of a family-run resort, the novel blends romance, grief, and the bittersweet ache of time passing. It’s a book that smells faintly of sunscreen and second chances. The story follows Fern Brookbanks, who once spent a single, life-altering day with a stranger named Will. Years later, their paths cross again — not in the carefree haze of youth, but amid the heavy responsibilities of adulthood. Fern is now running her family’s lakeside resort after her mother’s death; Will arrives with his own shadows in tow. What unfolds is less a meet-cute than a reckoning: with grief, with regret, and with the person you might have become had life gone differently. Fortune’s great gift is her ability to layer emotional truth beneath the trappings of a love story. The dialogue snaps with wit and intimacy, yet there’s melancholy under the sparkle. She writes summer the way Leonard Cohen wrote heartbreak — with reverence for both its beauty and its impermanence. Every detail feels authentic: the worn planks of a dock, the creak of a cabin screen door, the way light fractures on water as if remembering something. Where some romances hurry toward resolution, Meet Me at the Lake takes its time. Fortune understands that love stories worth telling don’t exist in isolation; they’re braided with memory, family, and loss. The novel explores how place itself — especially one as quintessentially Canadian as a lakeside resort — can hold echoes of who we were and who we hoped to be. This isn’t a book that demands grand gestures. Instead, it rewards quiet ones: the apology, the pause, the hand extended when words fail. It’s about returning to the scene of your younger self and realizing you’re both the same and irrevocably changed. Meet Me at the Lake is tender, confident, and suffused with wistful joy. It’s romance as restoration — the kind that makes you want to drive north, roll down the windows, and believe for a few hours that time might just be kind.