That Summer

Upon publication, That Summer was marketed as the ultimate “beach read” of 2022. This epithet placed the novel within a specific category of stories that first emerged in the 19th century alongside the popularization of the beach holiday and which were intended to be read casually during the summer, either on the beach or in a similarly non-academic setting. The term “beach read” gained popularity during the 1990s, when Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist began to employ it as a marketing term to target a female audience with fast-paced and often uncomplicated narratives. Originally considered to be a subsection of women’s fiction, “beach reads” are typically stereotyped as being more lighthearted and less intellectual than other more widely accepted genres of “serious literature.” Thus, beach reads were originally understood to simply be novels written by women and for women; the unspoken assumption was that because the novels addressed women’s issues, they were therefore of lesser value than other more cerebral works of fiction. Such an arbitrarily dismissive assessment of women’s fiction as a whole is both inherently misogynistic and outdated in its heteronormativity, suggesting a false division in the stereotypes surrounding the content that men and women are assumed to prefer to write and read.