Below is the complete list of Elle Kennedy’s Avalon Bay books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
Avalon Bay Books
- Good Girl Complex / Ever Since I Loved You (2022)
View Book - Bad Girl Reputation / Ever Since I Needed You (2022)
View Book - The Summer Girl (2023)
View Book
About Avalon Bay
Elle Kennedy’s Avalon Bay series is a compact contemporary-romance line set in a South Carolina beach town that doubles as a college town, and that combination is what gives the books their particular identity. On Kennedy’s official site, the core series consists of Good Girl Complex, Bad Girl Reputation, and The Summer Girl. The official pages for those novels also make clear that each book centers on a different couple while staying inside the same shared world.
What makes Avalon Bay work is the tension built into the setting itself. This is not just a pretty coastal backdrop. Kennedy uses the divide between wealthy Garnet College students and local town residents as a recurring source of friction, desire, resentment, and attraction. That gives the series more shape than a simple run of beach romances. The books are about class assumptions, reputation, old grudges, and the way people perform different versions of themselves depending on who is watching.
The first novel, Good Girl Complex, establishes that pattern especially well through Mackenzie “Mac” Cabot and Cooper Hartley. Mac arrives as an outsider from a wealthy background, while Cooper is firmly rooted in the local side of Avalon Bay. That opposition sets the tone for the series as a whole: attraction complicated by social difference, family expectations, and the uneasy overlap between townies and students. It is a strong opening because it defines Avalon Bay not merely as a place for romance, but as a place where identity is always being tested.
Bad Girl Reputation keeps the same world but shifts into second-chance territory, following Genevieve West and Evan Hartley. That move is useful because it shows the series is not locked into one emotional formula. Kennedy keeps the same fast pace and strong chemistry, but the focus turns more toward history, return, and the difficulty of escaping the version of yourself a town remembers. In a setting like Avalon Bay, past behavior and family reputation do not stay private for long, and Kennedy uses that pressure well.
By the time The Summer Girl arrives, the series feels more settled in its own identity. Cassie Soul’s story brings in another side of Avalon Bay through family ties, seasonal return, and the emotional pull of a place that feels both nostalgic and unstable. The novel keeps the beach-town atmosphere, but it also reinforces one of the series’ most consistent interests: young adults trying to decide whether they belong to the life they came from, the life expected of them, or something they will have to build for themselves.
What distinguishes Avalon Bay from Kennedy’s campus-centered series is that it is less enclosed. The college matters, but it does not dominate everything. The town itself has its own memory, hierarchy, and emotional weather. That gives the books a slightly broader feel than a pure campus romance, while still keeping the youthful energy, banter, and sexual tension that readers expect from Kennedy. The result is a series that feels summery and escapist on the surface, but underneath that surface is an ongoing interest in class tension, belonging, and the way place shapes romantic possibility.
Seen beneath an already completed list, Avalon Bay is best understood as a short, cohesive coastal romance series built around one sharply drawn social setting rather than one giant continuing plot. Its appeal lies in the shared town, the connected cast, and Kennedy’s ability to make each romance feel immediate while still contributing to a larger picture of Avalon Bay as a place divided by status, bound by history, and constantly alive with attraction and conflict.