Book Review: SATC Fans will devour ‘Summer and the City’ by Candace Bushnell

Sex and the City fans, you are in for an awesome treat. Author Candace Bushnell has written a prequel to her hit book Sex and the City. Last year, she released The Carrie Diaries, chronicling Carrie Bradshaw’s life as a senior in high school. Now, she is back with the next part of The Carrie Diaries. Summer and the City is about Carrie’s first time living in New York City. We get to see how this girl came to be one of the most iconic characters in history.

Now that Carrie has graduated high school and is accepted at Brown University, she doesn’t want to wait around all summer in her small town in Connecticut. She gets accepted into a Summer Writing program at the New School in New York City. The novel opens on a lost and mugged Carrie on the doorstep of Samantha Jones, a mutual friend’s cousin. Samantha takes her in, and from that point we get to follow Carrie’s on her first journey through New York City.

I haven’t read the first novel in the series. I looked at the description (Pretty much just read its wiki page. lol) and had enough knowledge to start reading my ARC of Summer and the City. This book is just brilliant. Carrie has a real voice, something that I automatically connected with from page one. Bushnell always gets her characters right, and this latest book is no exception. I breezed through this story so quickly because it was entirely interesting. The setting of 1980s NYC was great, and the descriptions of Carrie’s eccentric outfits are fun.

Understanding the background of these famous characters is engaging. After watching Sex and the City’s TV series and movies and enjoying them (Well, not really SATC2 because that was just bad), it is fascinating to finally get a full understanding of how these characters came to be. To see how much they have changed and stayed the same.  It makes them more real and relatable.  These women didn’t just get majorly successful with only a snap of their fingers, they worked for it. Yeah, yeah, there’s a bit over-exaggerating and slightly unrealistic moments, but for the most part, it sticks to the “real” side.

I absolutely recommend this book to any and all Sex and the City fans. You don’t even need to read the Carrie Diaries. Just pick Summer and the City up, and sit back and enjoy. You definitely won’t regret it. Hopefully, you’re just like me and become excited that Bushnell confirmed that she definitely will be writing two more YA books for HarperCollins. She hasn’t said if they’re part of the Carrie Diaries series, but after reading the end of Summer and the City, I’m almost 100% sure one of them will be.

Summer and the City will be available in bookstores on Tuesday, April 26^th.