Book Description 

Two Days Before

Ollie Veltman is finally coming home to the quaint island of Anchor’s Mercy after a year away while his mom battled cancer. It should be a celebration — his mom is cancer free, and she’s determined to have the best summer ever — but Ollie’s (now ex) best friends think he abandoned them, and he’s returning with a lot of questions. Because for a place that’s perfect on the surface, a secret rots below the waves. A secret that could explain his mom’s illness, and the illness of so many other locals.

Ollie’s desperate search for the truth turns life-or-death when a storm descends upon the island. In its wake, a long-sunken horror rises . . .

Three Weeks After

Ollie is being held in isolation aboard a military hospital ship in the harbor. They say he’s a survivor, but they only know half the story. The truth is more monstrous than Ollie ever believed, and he suspects his saviors aren’t here to save anyone. Only Ollie can stop what’s coming, but that means getting back to Anchor’s Mercy before it vanishes, taking with it everyone he has ever loved.

My Review 

The first thing that readers need to know is that this is the first book in a series and that it ends somewhat more abruptly than a regular book, even one in a planned series.. However, this should not deter readers from such an amazingly creative and action-packed story… and hopefully, awareness of a huge cliffhanger will make it less jarring. 

Picture a cross between Provincetown and Martha’s Vineyard and you’ll get Anchor’s Mercy, an island off the coast of Maine; home to a vibrant drag queen scene as well as a secretive history about some sort of chemical disaster in the 1960s. 

The narrative is split between before and during a catastrophic event and after, when Ollie is in isolation. Several of the “after” passages take the form of interviews between Ollie and a scientist, which I found to be an extremely creative medium. 

This was such a good book. I’m not the target demographic by any stretch of the imagination, but this book had me HOOKED. I found myself reading quickly because I needed to find out what was going to happen next, why everything was going to happen, and whether or not Ollie and his friends were going to escape unscathed. I can’t say too much about what happens because the growing sense of horror was simply exquisite and readers would benefit from going in with as little info as possible. 

I would absolutely recommend The Dead of Summer. This is not my first La Sala book, but I haven’t read nearly as many of his books as I ought to have because they are all just brilliant. I’m certainly going to be eagerly awaiting the conclusion of Ollie and his friends’ plight because I need to know what’s going to happen to them.  

I received a digital ARC of this book from Scholastic/NetGalley.