Our (Midwest-themed) 2024 Summer reading list
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Hot take: A summer staycation is underrated—especially when it comes to books!
Here are a few great summer reads that won’t take you far from home. From the Great Lakes beaches and pastoral fruit farms to mysterious small towns these books based in flyover states will remind you that Midwest really is best.
Peek our shamelessly Midwest-themed Summer 2024 reading list:
Midwest native and romcom maestro, Emily Henry, takes from her experiences on the west coast of Michigan in her newest release Funny Story.
Using the “Fake Dating” romance novel trope and her classically great character development, we meet Daphne and Miles who have both been cheated on by their ex-fiances who are now getting married to one another. So,they decide to go to the wedding together… as a couple.
If you are looking for witty banter, a new friends to lovers relationship, and of scenes of farm stands, libraries, and cozy beach towns, this is your read.
Set among a cherry farm in northern Michigan in the spring of 2020, fall in love with Lara and her three grown daughters in Tom Lake by Anne Pachett.
For a moment in her youth, Lara was on the path to stardom and linked to an eventually famous actor. With the slowness of quarantine, summer on the farm in Michigan, and their own lives on pause thanks to the pandemic, Lara’s grown daughters start to inquire about their mom’s past and how it meshes with their futures.
Anne Pachett is touted as one of the great writers of our time and her artistry shines in the development of each character and scene.
Ashley Flowers, Indiana resistant and host of the uber popular podcast, Crime Junkies, debuted as an author in 2022 with All Good People Here.
Inspired by her career and roots, Ashley built a mystery in a small fictional Indiana town. Her protagonist, Margot, is a now grown up journalist who returns to her hometown to report on a missing young girl.
As it does, the rumor mill in the small town starts to hypothesize if there is a link in this case to an unsolved murder of a young girl twenty years earlier. A murder that happened to Margot’s neighbor and childhood best friend and has haunted her for twenty years. Can she solve her friend’s murder? Or will she find out that the smallest towns have the biggest secrets?
You know the idea of “the one before the one.” What if it was actually your lot in life to always be “the one before the one?” That’s the case for Justin, and when his curse is splashed all over the internet, women flood his DMs constantly asking for dates.
One of these women is Emma, a traveling nurse who believes she might have the same curse. A connection is made and together they decide to see if they can break the curse when Emma starts a contracted job at a hospital in Minnesota near Justin.
Just For The Summer has classic Abby Jimenez twists and turns, comedy and emotion, and tons of reviews claiming it to be the best book of the year!
Gripping is the best way to describe the Axton Betz-Hamilton memoir, The Less People Know About Us.
Growing up in rural Indiana, Axton’s parents dealt with destroyed credit from their identities being stolen over and over. It led to constant fights and fears about money and confusion for everyone involved, even the police. Try as they may, they couldn’t escape it so Axton’s mother believed they should shut themselves off from the rest of the world, fearful anyone close to them could be the perpetrator. Axton spends so many of her early years anxious and on her own.
But, years later, as she tries to get utilities for her Purdue University apartment she learns her own credit is also ruined which leads her to try to untangle a mess of money, family, lies, and betrayal. A true story where Axton now makes child ID theft her life’s work will keep you turning the page and locking your (and your kids!) credit.
LOOKING FOR BOOKS FOR YOUR LITTLES?
Chuy Renteria is a first generation Mexican-American and in his collections of essays, We Heard It When We Were Young, he explores his childhood in the first majority Hispanic town of Iowa.
Straddling two cultures, Chuy and his millennial peers try to find their identity in their coming of age as their parents try to navigate a new country and a new town that comes into the spotlight as an antagonist to the presumed “American Dream.”
Thought provoking, balanced, and even funny, this will have you imagining another life and another view of “midwest” and “small town.”
The Lakeside Supper Club of the Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club has been in the family for years, but Mariel always assumed it would go to her mother.
Plus, she married into another Minnesota restaurant family. But, it’s failing and so maybe the surprise gift of the Lakeside Supper Club could be their salvation.
Full of food and family, author J. Ryan Stradel of other midwest based foodie stories like Kitchens of the Great Midwest and The Lager Queen of Minnesota will make you fall in love with these characters and this heartland story.
