Spotlight & Giveaway: That Summer Feeling by Bridget Morrissey

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Bridget Morrissey to HJ!

Hi Bridget and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, That Summer Feeling!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

THAT SUMMER FEELING is the story of Garland, a recent divorcée who agrees to go to an adults-only summer sleepaway camp with her older sister in an effort to reconnect with her joy. While there, she runs into a man she once thought she had a connection with, only to find herself falling head over heels for his sister instead.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

“I had never felt such a comfort with my desire. It was easy in the way all good things were, like when you found yourself wondering why you didn’t always take a nice walk on a beautiful dinner or cook your favorite meal for dinner. Why didn’t I always wake up with the sun to kiss Stevie Magnusson on the dock of the lake?”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

There is an extended cameo in THAT SUMMER FEELING from a very small character from my previous novel, A THOUSAND MILES. This book also contains a use of the song “Hoedown Throwdown” from the Hannah Montana movie, which makes me chuckle.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

Garland and Stevie both find themselves attracted to one another because they each possess something the other doesn’t have. Garland is always trying to avoid conflict and keep the peace, whereas Stevie is really bold and direct. But Stevie needs a little of Garland’s softness and tact, and Garland needs some of Stevie’s commanding presence. A big theme in this book is how to be a teammate, and they end up being each other’s best teammate.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

It’s pretty rare for me to make myself emotional writing my own work, but there were more than a few scenes in this book that choked me up a bit while drafting them, notably the haircutting scene between Garland and her sister Dara. It was one of the very last scenes I wrote for this book, and it just ended up being really sentimental for me on several levels. It’s a big moment for the two sisters, and it was also a big moment for me as a writer, finally finishing this novel.

Readers should read this book….

I think readers should pick this up if they enjoy sapphic romances that center queer found family and focus on inner healing and growth. I hope that readers finish this book and want to reconnect with something from their childhood that they never got the chance to do!

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

Nothing I can share yet. Hopefully more to come soon!
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: 1 Print copy of That Summer Feeling by Bridget Morrissey

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Excerpt from That Summer Feeling:

y favorite kind of daydreaming used to be imagining all the people I could love. I did it with movie stars. Strangers on the street. Casual acquaintances. I closed my eyes, and for a brief, beautiful moment, our life together played out for me. That was how I’d moved through the world before Ethan. Then I met him the third week of my freshman year of college, and the sweet little scenarios I made up in my mind actually happened, which was how I’d decided he had to
be the one.
I’d first seen him standing in another aisle of a used book- store a good fifteen miles away from campus. For a fleeting moment, I imagined the two of us bumping into each other and falling in love, living a beautiful, uncomplicated life to- gether where we spontaneously picnicked in the park on a random Tuesday afternoon or built a pillow fort in our living room whenever it rained. The thought was gone as fast as it

came, and I kept browsing, pleased with the small dopamine hit I got from the miniature fantasy I’d created.
I’d squatted down to pet the store cat, not realizing Ethan was beside me, about to do the same thing. Our hands acci- dentally grazed as we both reached for the tabby. We looked at each other and laughed.
Ethan held up another copy of the book I was holding. He said, “I saw you with this, and I figured I should read it too. We can talk about it on our first date.”
We quickly realized we were both students at UCLA who had happened to take a random Thursday-afternoon trip to the valley to visit a used bookstore. There was no way it was a coincidence. It was too specific and strange to be random. It had to be fate.
We got married in a small ceremony on the beach in Mal- ibu, surrounded by loved ones. We had a beautiful honey- moon in Cancún. We bought a craftsman in Pasadena for way too much money (all Ethan’s), and he let me paint the walls dark green and buy more plants than any human should ever be allowed to house indoors. It was lovely. Exactly the kind of relationship I’d always thought I should have. Aspirational. Picturesque. Safe.
Then he surprised me with a divorce over Valentine’s Day dinner, and all the little head-in-the-clouds quirks about my- self I once saw as wondrous now seemed like a burden.
I’d spent years wincing at the sight of surfer types. When I came across tall white men with blond hair in public, I turned in the other direction. My entire marriage to Ethan depended upon me ignoring what had happened when a stranger once brushed hands with me in the airport. What I’d experienced that day never felt like a figment of my imagin- ation in the way my other daydream scenarios did. It felt instead like a pivotal moment of my life being revealed to me—a slip in the timeline where I glimpsed my future a little earlier than I was supposed to—and I decided that was some- thing I could reject altogether. Not all future paths set out for me were ones I had to walk.
If anything, choosing Ethan seemed like the most ro- mantic thing I could possibly do. I’d seen a lovely life that had nothing to do with him, and I’d turned it down in favor of the man I already knew. The steady presence I thought I could rely on. Then he told me I romanticized everything. He said I put a filter over my struggles to make them more palatable, and it prevented me from showing up to the life I had.
When I came to, sitting under the shade of a gigantic white oak tree in the middle of the mountains, it seemed pos- sible I’d somehow escaped reality altogether and gotten trapped inside the one daydream I’d ever hid from—the man from the airport I’d seen for half a minute, several years ago.
Mason.
He stood a few feet away, gaping at me. He couldn’t be real, but he was. And his sister sat directly to my right, press- ing a cool compress to my forehead.
“She’s awake,” she said to someone I couldn’t yet see. She handed me a bottle of water.
I unscrewed the lid and took a delicate sip.
Dara appeared, squatting down in front of me. “Shit, Gar- land. Are you okay? I’ve never seen you do that before in my life.” She looked impressed, confused, and a little angry, which wasn’t that far from her usual expression, but I knew the difference.
“I don’t know what happened,” I lied.
My airport vision was the one thing I’d never told Dara about. If I’d shared it with her, she’d have taken me too ser- iously. She’d have treated it like it mattered, and back then, the vision couldn’t matter to me. It didn’t match the life I’d already established for myself.
For as practical as she seemed to everyone else, Dara still believed in the magic the world could possess. Not even my divorce had gotten her down. She wasn’t one of those people who evangelized The Secret or anything, but she did make wishes on eyelashes and coins she tossed into fountains, and she treated those wishes as law. She thought angel numbers guided her, and that randomly noticing a detail she hadn’t perceived before meant she was destined to see it at that exact moment. Both of us were in our thirties, single, and living in an apartment together, and she saw it all as part of some big, beautiful cosmic plan.
I used to believe all the same things. Then Ethan served me divorce papers, and every single iota of the self-made wonder I’d dusted over my life got wiped away, revealing nothing but disenchantment. I had no interest in trying to love someone new ever again. Over and over, the only constant message the world had given was that romantic love failed me. The worst part was, I still couldn’t let go of Ethan. If he were to call, I’d answer. If he wanted me to move back, I’d go. I lived my life in waiting mode, holding out for Ethan’s return.

And now here I was, with the man from the airport a few feet away from me.
“I think the heat got to me or something,” I made up as an excuse. It was late afternoon. A strong breeze had been blow- ing all day. Under the shade of thick foliage, high up in the mountains, overheating was a spectacular stretch.
“I thought maybe the sight of my brother’s face scared you,” Stevie joked, oblivious to how correct she was. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
I smiled weakly, taking another sip of water. “I feel much better now. I promise.”
“The nurse still wants to see you,” Stevie told me. “The twins are getting her right now. She wasn’t even set up yet when you went down.”
Bravely, I looked around. The other campers were watch- ing me. Some blatantly, some in quick glances. They were a blur of unfamiliar faces, mysterious portraits of concern and fascination. The twins and an older woman, presumably the camp nurse, emerged from among them. Even though I in- sisted I was fine, the nurse asked me to sit in the wheelchair she’d brought.
“We’ll wait to do our introductory speech until after you’re back,” Tommy told me.
“What a start to the week,” Tim joked, patting my shoulder. “Glad you’re better now. But let’s be sure you’re really okay.”
They were being so nice that tears filled my eyes. All of this could have been very embarrassing. Everyone at camp cared for me instead of laughing at me.

Dara and Stevie came along as the nurse pushed me to- ward the camp infirmary.
“I’ve never done anything like this before,” I said to Stevie.
I didn’t want her to regret our alliance.
“She really hasn’t,” Dara confirmed. “Although when we were little, I made her think there was a ghost living behind our shower curtain. Then I hid in there to scare her, and she screamed so much she damaged a vocal cord. She does love to do things to the extreme.”
“I’m still afraid of what lurks behind shower curtains,” I admitted. “I check in everyone’s bathrooms.”
“Now you can be afraid of Mason too,” Stevie joked, once again hitting the nail on the head.
It wasn’t meant to be that funny, but Dara laughed anyway. She must have appreciated that Stevie had immediately begun to look out for me, so she treated Stevie like an equal, which was an accomplishment when it came to my sister. She saw very few people as true peers.
To no surprise, I passed my checkup with flying colors. Nothing was wrong with me aside from something much deeper than a camp nurse could see while looking into my pupils with a flashlight. The nurse chalked it up to me being overstimulated, and I cosigned that heartily. If that kept everyone else satisfied, it was good enough for me.
The full reality of what was actually occurring had no
proper diagnosis.
After my marriage died, I swore off the prospect of dating anyone new. I’d already had my big love story. I could never put myself through another. Not when I’d made everyone in my life fly to California for my wedding and they’d all watched me walk down the aisle and say supposedly eternal vows to someone who didn’t actually want to stay with me forever.
It was embarrassing to have failed like that, especially be- cause the reason behind our split never seemed to satisfy anyone I told. It wasn’t infidelity. There was no big lie that had destroyed us. No abuse. It came down to something deceptively simple and painful—Ethan just didn’t want to be me with anymore.
Even my parents hadn’t understood how that could be. To them, there had to be some big gotcha that made getting a di- vorce the right move. Otherwise why wouldn’t we just stick it out? How could I not convince Ethan to keep me around? I’d always known that to my parents, love meant suffering. It meant enduring everything, no matter how bad. Only some- thing publicly shameful was worth splitting up over. Even then, a case could be made for “forgiveness.”
I always thought that my parents’ brand of love was the worst fate. Being trapped together and refusing to let the other one escape. I’d never prepared myself for the possibility of being rejected by someone I’d promised to spend my whole life with—a person I’d given so much of my time and energy, to- ward loving as best I could. That was exactly why I wanted him back. I knew he was wrong about us. He was wrong about me. So even if my soulmate happened to be here—and accord- ing to my own vision, he was—I wasn’t about to do anything
about it.
I was not going to be falling in love at summer camp.

Excerpted from THAT SUMMER FEELING by Bridget Morrissey, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Garland Moore used to believe in magic, the power of optimism, and signs from the universe. Then her husband surprised her with divorce papers over Valentine’s Day dinner. Now Garland isn’t sure what to believe anymore, except that she’s clearly never meant to love again. When new friends invite her to spend a week at their reopened sleepaway camp, she and her sister decide it’s an opportunity to enjoy the kind of summer getaway they never had as kids. If Garland still believed in signs, this would sure seem like one. Summer camp is a chance to let go of her past and start fresh.

Nestled into the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains, Camp Carl Cove provides the exact escape Garland always dreamed of, until she runs into Mason—the man she had a premonition about after one brief meeting years ago. No matter how she tries to run, the universe appears determined to bring love back into Garland’s life. She even ends up rooming with Mason’s sister Stevie, a vibrant former park ranger who is as charming as she is competitive. The more time Garland spends with Stevie, the more the signs confuse her. The stars are aligning in a way Garland never could have predicted.

Amid camp tournaments and moonlit dances, Garland continues to be pulled toward the beautiful blonde outdoorswoman who makes her laugh and swoon. Summer camp doesn’t last forever, but if Garland can learn to trust her heart, the love she finds there just might.
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Meet the Author:

Bridget Morrissey lives in Los Angeles, California, but hails from Oak Forest, Illinois. When she is not writing, she can be found coaching gymnastics or headlining concerts in her living room.
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