The Summer of Perfect Mistakes by Cynthia St. Aubin

I had the pleasure of meeting Cynthia St. Aubin, author of this super-fun read, at the grand opening of Open Door Romance, a new all-romance bookstore in St. Louis, MO. The Summer of Perfect Mistakes was my first introduction to her books and I will now be hunting down everything she’s ever written. 

This is a classic ‘who do I want to be when I grow up’ story and one that every gifted, overachieving, perfectionist will relate to.  (Raise your hands, all!)  Lark Woodley has spent her every waking moment ticking all the boxes and leaping over every hurdle along the road of everyone else’s expectations for her perfect life — through high school, college, right into her Ivy League medical school. Until it all becomes too much and the last straw triggers an avalanche of anxiety and crippling panic attacks that trash her carefully-curated life. 

Enter Nick Hoffman, the juvenile delinquent to her valedictorian prom queen, back home on his own figure-out-my-life quest (I mean, really — aren’t we all?). In a two-steps-forward, one-step-back dance, the two try to figure out what kind of lives they each really want if they weren’t hemming themselves in with the expectations of everyone else. But that brings up another tough question: can they pursue their chosen lives and still have each other? 

The plot is great and the characters wonderful, both presented with the perfect blend of angst and wit. Art plays a big part in the story, and St. Aubin writes like an artist, painting beautiful, vivid pictures with her words. Like when she describes Nick’s father as “the man whose negative spaces had described the shape of Nick’s ambitions. He’d simply wanted to be everything Avram Hoffman was not.”  Or Lark’s mother as “pastor at the church of Our Lady of Dress Better and You’ll Feel Better.” And “For this moment, Nick measured himself not by the weight of his past — his losses, failures or mistakes, but by the span of his palms as they slid up her rib cage.”  

Yeah. Break out the fans, folks. It gets hot in there.