Just for the Summer — Part of Your World Book 3

A Summer Romance With a Clever Hook

Just for the Summer is the third novel in Abby Jimenez’s Part of Your World universe, and it pairs Emma and Justin, two people who share an unusual superstition: each of them seems to be cursed, in that whoever they date inevitably goes on to meet their true soulmate immediately afterward. Their solution is gloriously logical and entirely doomed — date each other, break both curses, and walk away by the end of summer. Naturally, the arrangement that was supposed to be temporary refuses to stay that way.

Jimenez is working here in her most purely romantic register, with a fresh high-concept premise, a warmly rendered summer setting, and a relationship that escalates exactly as fast as the reader fears it will. Beneath the rom-com surface, though, she threads the harder material — family dysfunction, mental health, the fear of being someone’s stepping stone rather than their destination — that has always distinguished her work from lighter beach reads.

The Curse as Premise

The curse-breaker premise — that whoever either Emma or Justin dates before their next real relationship will find their perfect match — is one of contemporary romance’s freshest recent setups because it makes the romantic pair actively aware of what they are to each other. They are not simply two people drawn together; they are two people who have theorized their own dynamic and arrived at an agreement about how to use it. The self-consciousness of this setup is entirely in keeping with the contemporary romance’s interest in characters who can articulate their own emotional situations even when they can’t act on what they know.

The premise also creates a specific kind of ticking clock. The arrangement has an expiration date built into its own logic: it ends when one of them meets the person they’re meant to be with. This generates dread rather than simply anticipation — the better things get between Emma and Justin, the more clearly the reader can see that the ending of the arrangement is coming, and the more the reader (and the characters) resists it.

The Summer Setting

Jimenez is skilled at using setting to create emotional atmosphere, and the summer romance setting in Just for the Summer works precisely because summer is a temporally bounded season. Everyone knows summer ends. The arrangement’s expiration date and the season’s natural conclusion are aligned, and the alignment creates a layered urgency: the arrangement, the summer, the beach house, the specific world that exists only in this window, are all ending together. This is the seasonal romance formula deployed with structural intention rather than simply atmospheric decoration.

The beach house setting also creates the forced proximity that Jimenez has used across her catalog — the enclosed social space in which the characters cannot easily avoid each other or the questions their proximity raises.

Emma and Justin as Characters

One of the novel’s strengths is that both leads have specific reasons for believing in the curse. They have each been in the position of the person who was dated before someone’s happy relationship — they know this pattern from personal experience, not from superstition alone. This gives the premise a psychological grounding that pure magical thinking would lack. The theory is silly and they know it, but it is silly in the way that most human attempts to find patterns in emotional experience are silly: it reflects a genuine need to make sense of what keeps happening.

Justin’s particular history with the pattern — the number of times it has recurred, the specific relationships that ended with his exes finding their people — gives him a slightly rueful self-awareness that is one of the novel’s comic pleasures. He is a man who has talked himself into a theory about his own romantic life, and he is holding it with the particular mix of conviction and self-mockery that people bring to their half-believed superstitions.

Series Position and Standalone Quality

As the third book in the Part of Your World series, Just for the Summer benefits from the accumulated warmth of the preceding novels’ universe while operating as a complete standalone. Readers arriving from Part of Your World and Yours Truly will find familiar faces and a world they know; readers arriving fresh will find all the context they need within the novel itself. Jimenez has become skilled at calibrating the series/standalone balance, and this entry is one of her cleanest executions of it.

Beneath the Rom-Com Surface

What keeps Just for the Summer from floating away on its own charm is the heavier material Jimenez threads beneath the playful premise. Emma’s history — an unreliable, emotionally volatile mother whose needs have shaped Emma into a perpetual caretaker who never plants roots — gives the novel a genuine emotional spine, and the recurring question of whether Emma can let herself stay anywhere, or with anyone, is more affecting than the curse conceit alone would suggest. Justin, meanwhile, has quietly assembled a found family of younger half-siblings he is helping to raise, and his steadiness is presented not as blandness but as a hard-won achievement. Jimenez has built her career on exactly this move: wrapping serious subjects — mental illness, abandonment, the fear of inadequacy — inside accessible, funny, fast-reading romance, so that readers who came for the banter leave having felt something real. Just for the Summer is lighter than her most devastating books, but it is not weightless, and the contrast between its sunny surface and its more anxious undercurrents is a large part of what makes the eventual payoff land.

The Verdict

Just for the Summer shows Jimenez at her most charming: a genuinely fresh curse-breaker premise, a beach-house atmosphere rendered with real warmth, and an expiration-date tension handled with more craft than most limited-time romances manage. The built-in clock generates dread rather than mere anticipation, and both leads are given enough psychological grounding to make their silly theory feel human. It works as a standalone, though it rewards readers of the earlier books, and some may find its premise lighter than her most emotionally devastating work.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Jimenez at her most purely romantic, with a fresh premise, warmly rendered summer atmosphere, and the emotional escalation that makes you dread the ending you can see coming.

Reading Guides

• Abby Jimenez Books in Order: Complete Reading Guide