51 pages • 1 hour read
Tessa BaileyIt Happened One Summer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Tessa Bailey
Since the release of her first novel in 2013, Tessa Bailey published nearly 50 romance novels before the publication of It Happened One Summer. She has published standalone novels as well as several series of her own and in concert with other authors. She has published independently as well as with traditional publishers, and several of her books have reached bestseller lists, making her a prolific and successful hybrid author and a recognizable name in the romance genre.
Her heroes are men of strict integrity, for instance in her Line of Duty, Crossing the Line, and Academy series, which feature heroes who are police officers or police officers in training in Chicago and New York City. Many of her heroines are experiencing upheavals in their life, like the leads from the Hot and Hammered trilogy. She also enjoys writing heroines who create upheaval in the orderly lives of their heroes, for instance in the Girl series, and her Romancing the Clarkson series also tells the love stories of a set of siblings.
Bailey experiments broadly with tropes like the marriage of convenience and girl-next-door setups, and she also enjoys writing relationships between characters of very different socioeconomic backgrounds. While her Made in Jersey series spotlights working-class characters from New Jersey, her Broke and Beautiful series includes pairings of a college dropout with a spoiled rich boy, a college student and her professor, and a construction worker with an uptown girl.
All of Bailey’s books include explicit sex. Most of her pairings are between hetero men and women, though Heat Stroke from her Beach Kingdom series includes two male leads. Bailey’s website identifies her author brand as “[h]eat, laughter, and happily ever after.” These qualities, along with the difference in backgrounds, the fish-out-of-water plot trope, and the hero’s arduous job and personal integrity, make It Happened One Summer characteristic of Bailey’s work.
Literary Context: Contemporary Romance
Romance consistently wins the largest slice of the fiction book market, with sales of over $1 billion a year in print, digital, and audio formats, according to Romance Writers of America. Avon Books, the publisher of It Happened One Summer, is an established imprint dedicated to publishing romance, with a long history of publishing best-selling and award-winning authors.
Romance is often considered “commercial” fiction, as opposed to “literary” fiction, which carries different reader expectations. Of the several romance subgenres, contemporary romance is the most popular. “Contemporary” is described as happening in the reader’s present day, while “historical” typically designates works set at least 50 years earlier.
Romantic comedy has recently become a popular category of contemporary romance. Romantic comedies tend to feature young, attractive, and appealing leads; humor is a strong element in both the writing and the character interactions; and circumstances can tend toward the quirky or ridiculous. While writers may not shy away from painful subjects, the overall tone of rom-coms, as they are called, tends to be happy and light as characters overcome their obstacles and grow in personal awareness through their love relationship. It Happened One Summer can be classified as a romantic comedy, and the brightly colored, cartoon-like cover, a popular trend at the time of publication, communicates the book’s bright, humorous tone.
Contemporary romances rely on a consistent plot structure, familiar character types, and a pool of tropes and techniques that readers enjoy. Plot requirements of romantic comedies include the “meet cute,” when the leads meet under unusual circumstances and make a vivid impression on one another. Unlike the erotica genre, readers of romance expect that an emotional attachment will develop along with sexual attraction. They also expect that the characters’ other life obstacles will be resolved by the success of their romantic attachment.
Cultural Context: Schitt’s Creek
Schitt’s Creek (also written as Schitt$ Creek) is a Canadian television series that ran for six seasons, from 2015 to 2020, and explored the challenges of the once-wealthy Rose family after they lose their money and are forced to relocate to the tiny rural town of Schitt’s Creek, which they own. The series was first popular in Canada and then, after it was picked up by the streaming service Netflix, became a hit in the United States. The series won many awards for writing and directing as well as acting, and the show’s final season swept the Emmys with wins including a Lead and Supporting Actor/Actress award for each of the four main actors in the cast.
The series derives much of its humor from the class and culture differences that the rich, pampered members of the Rose family encounter with the down-to-earth, working-class residents of Schitt’s Creek. The Rose family includes businessman Johnny (portrayed by Eugene Levy), former actress Moira (Catherine O’Hara), their son, David (Dan Levy, Eugene Levy’s son in real life), and their daughter, Alexis (Annie Murphy). Author Tessa Bailey writes in the Acknowledgements of It Happened One Summer that she “fell so madly in love” with the character of Alexis that she “needed to give her a happily ever after via Piper” (i).
Several parallels to Alexis appear in Bailey’s characterization of Piper. Alexis begins the show as a pampered and self-absorbed character. She is pretty, blonde, young, and not known for responsibility or intellect. Actress Murphy portrays her as flirtatious, fun, and very image conscious. Her signature moves are saying “ew” and holding her hands with her arm bent at the elbow, wrist lifted and limp.
In the first episode of the series, Alexis is disappointed and hurt when her boyfriend breaks up with her. In the second episode, Alexis kisses a handsome, bearded stranger at a tailgate party so she can take a picture and post it to social media to show she’s not affected by the breakup. Alexis is affected by the kiss and, in the third episode, she approaches the bearded stranger (who is Mutt Schitt, portrayed by actor Tim Rozon) at his house wearing cute shorts and a fashionable floppy hat, an outfit Bailey gives Piper in the novel’s meet cute. Readers may also note that Bailey incorporates Mutt’s beard, his laconic nature, and his sexual charisma into the character of Brendan Taggart.
While Alexis and Mutt’s relationship does not last through season two, it’s easy to read Piper and Brendan as an imaginative version of a successful relationship for them. Readers familiar with the show may enjoy the parallels between the characters, the development of an emotional bond as well as a sexual relationship, and the ways that the better qualities of Alexis, like her kindness and loyalty to her family, are developed in the character of Piper.
Physical Context: King Crab Fishing
King crab meat is an expensive and sought-after delicacy for seafood lovers. Alaskan king crab is wild-caught in and around the Bering Sea, including Bristol Bay, Norton Sound, and Pribilof Islands. As acknowledged in the novel, fishing for king crab is documented as the most hazardous occupation in the United States, with almost double the fatalities of other forms of commercial fishing. Fishing boats require a skilled crew who can be at sea for weeks at a time. While the king crab season lasts from October to January, as it is prohibited to fish while crabs are mating or molting, Bailey creates an early season, moving Brendan’s trips to August to suit the purposes of her narrative.
Bailey’s portrayal of crab fishing techniques is accurate, as the usual method is to lower a line of pots—large steel traps covered with mesh, baited with herring or codfish. Pots are marked with a buoy and pulled up one or two days later. The pots are large and heavy, and they require a hydraulic system to lift and lower them. Once pulled, the catch must be sorted, as there are strict size requirements for male crabs, and females must be immediately released. Harvestable crabs are kept in live storage and conveyed to shore, where they are sold, flash frozen, and shipped all over the world, where they provide an expensive but sustainably sourced menu item.
The main dangers to a king crab fisherman are the cold temperature of the water and the heavy equipment. It is hard, demanding work that holds the potential for great reward but can also be unpredictable. The qualities of determination, fortitude, perseverance, and physical strength that Bailey gives to her fisherman protagonist, Brendan Taggart, make him suitable for this profession.
Related Titles
By Tessa Bailey
