BIPOC Beach Reads

Summer on the Bluffs is The View cohost Sunny Hostin’s debut. It follows Amelia “Ama” Vaux, who lives in the picturesque and wealthy Black beach community Oak Bluffs. She has three goddaughters—Billie, Perry, and Olivia—who she often spends relaxing summers with. This summer brings something a little new, though. This summer, she plans to move to Southern France with her college love and is looking to give one of her goddaughters her house. To decide who gets it, she’ll have them spend a summer at her place like they used to do when they were kids. But each of them has a secret that they think may get in the way of inheritance…

The cover alone is giving glam, cute beach read, which it pretty much is. Bottle of sunshine Bhanu, runs into her work nemesis Sunny, the grump who has a “Denzel voice” (!!), while she’s visiting family in Hawai’i. She can’t stand him, sure, but she does feel a spark of empathy when she sees him getting berated about being single by his ex. So Bhanu, cuddle bug that she is, goes up to them and claims to be Sunny’s girlfriend to spare him. And, since Sunny’s ex has already texted his friend’s entire wedding party about it, he realizes that the best thing would be to go along with the rouse. And the rouse gets a little raunchy.

This rom-com serves up some quality giggles. In it, Aaliyah is set on bringing in her 30th birthday with a boyfriend. Problem is, her dating life is trash, so she joins a dating app. But the online dating world is also basura, with all its fetishizing and catfishing. She has her best friends and a friendly local bartender to support her, and as she continues her search for love, she finds out that it might have been closer to her than she first thought.

More bartender love! This time featuring Cash Delgado, a queer single mother of a 6-year-old daughter who manages a bar in a small town. When her last hookup, Chase Stanton, shows up again, it’s with a business deal that may threaten Cash’s plans for the future. As she’s trying to deal with that, there’s also those pesky intimate dreams she starts having of her best friend Inez…

Kevin Kwan, of Crazy Rich Asians fame, is back with another decadently funny romance with bougie boos. Rufus Leung Gresham is in a situation. You see, though he is the future Duke of Greshambury, there isn’t anything left in the Gresham Trust that hasn’t been eaten up by debt. His mom, a former supermodel trying to hold onto The Bag^TM, is trying to get him in on her scheming. If he can find a wealthy (future) wife at his sister’s upcoming luxury wedding, maybe he can salvage things. While there are certainly eligible bachelorettes there, like a French hotel heiress and a venture capitalist extraordinaire, Rufus can’t stop thinking of his firmly middle-class neighbor, Eden Tong. But all of the considerations for his future partner get put on hold when a volcano erupts during wedding events, and some of the family’s business gets aired out.