A subtle, deeply penetrating meditation on first love, memory, and the moments that shape who we become.
Hunniecutt’s quietly powerful coming-of-age novel captures the fragile intensity of first love and the lasting imprint it leaves. Madi expects a quiet summer of books and ocean air at her grandparents’ Florida condo. When she meets Matthew, the lifeguard next door, his steady presence and unassuming heroism disrupt her carefully contained world. As the beach turns its gaze toward him, Madi discovers a connection that feels both dangerous and inevitable. A hurricane fractures the season, and time does the rest. When they cross paths years later, the past resurfaces. Can first love endure the distance between who we were and who we’ve become?
What begins as a summer story—sunlit beaches, borrowed freedom, and the thrill of noticing someone for the first time—slowly reveals itself as a thoughtful exploration of identity, responsibility, and the enduring pull of unfinished love. Hunniecutt approaches adolescence with uncommon restraint. Rather than dramatizing youth, he listens to it. Madi’s interior life—her self-consciousness, her intelligence, her unease with attention—is rendered with precision and care. She is sketched not as innocence embodied, but as a young woman finding her footing in the world. Matthew also sidesteps stereotype. Though admired from afar as a lifeguard and athlete, he emerges as a person shaped by discipline, empathy, and the quiet burden of being relied upon. Heroism here is not spectacle but instinct.
The Florida coastline is more than a setting; it is the novel’s emotional grammar. The ocean’s beauty and danger mirror the volatility of first love, while the approaching hurricane becomes a charged reckoning—externalizing the risks both characters must face if they are to move beyond safety and silence. Hunniecutt’s pacing allows these metaphors to deepen organically, never forced, never ornamental. One of the novel’s most resonant strengths is its attention to time. The later reunion does not trade in nostalgia alone but interrogates it, asking what survives when youth gives way to experience. Measured, emotionally intelligent, and unafraid of stillness, the novel honors the intensity of young love without romanticizing it—and acknowledges that some connections endure not because they are perfect, but because they mattered deeply.
Readers who loved Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen and The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han will find much to savor here.
Welling Up
Pub date January 27, 2026
ISBN 979-8988742050
Price $26.95 (USD) Hardcover, $3.99 Kindle edition
