Chelsey's 2025 Fiction Summer Reading Guide

A bunch of books with less intense deaths than my normal reading

I have seen a bunch of fun summer reading guides on Substack recently, and I wish I had thought about this before now so that I could have made a bigger and more comprehensive summer reading guide. But it’s already summer, and I know many people are about to be going on vacation and maybe hoping to bring along a good book.

Here are 20 fiction books that I think give off summer vibes. Some of them have darker themes and death does occur in some of them. But when people die in these books, it’s usually summer! So it’s not as bad as when people die in books in the dead of winter. I decided to make a little key so you can decide if any of these books are not for you.

🪦| Someone dies
🗡️ | Violent death or murder
🔥| Adult content (I don’t read anything extremely graphic)
🌧️| Unhappy / bittersweet ending

Remember that the library is a great place to get…