During summers in college, I would sometimes spend a few weeks with my cousins who lived about an hour away from where I grew up. We would drive around and hang out with their friends, visit their summer jobs, walk to their neighbors’ house for a bonfire, and just generally enjoy a less strict and very different vibe than I had back home. It didn’t take long to settle into the routine, to feel like their friends were my friends, to feel like this summer life was my new real life and that maybe it would never end. I imagine it’s also how going to summer camp can feel, stepping out of your real life and starting to wonder if you ever want to go back.

That surreal summer feeling is perfectly captured in Sterling Point. Annie (Ella Rubin) is a serious teenager with an aggressive multi-step morning skin care routine, a strict life plan, and a parentified role in her family, which consists of her father, who adopted her and her twin brother Connor (Keen Ruffalo) as newborns, and raised them alone when their (adoptive) mother died when they were only two. Annie finds her life a bit upturned when she doesn’t get into the business school summer program she was hoping to get into to smooth her path to Wharton. On top of that, she finds out she and her twin brother Connor (Keen Ruffalo) inherited some property in Canada from their maternal grandfather, who they were always told by their father was an asshole who wanted nothing to do with them after their mother died. When looking into this potential property, Annie finds proof that’s not true at all and their grandfather did want them in his life, and left her a note that included the mysterious phrase, “Find her.” So, since her life plan is already off track anyway, Annie decides to go see what she can learn about the family she never knew, even though doing so will place her squarely out of her element.

When she gets to the Canadian island she has inherited, Annie meets the local teens, who happen to be a fun and vibrant group of mostly queer people. This includes the charming Oona (Bo Bragason) and her British accent she uses to woo wealthy married women there on vacation, Oona’s precocious little sister Maple (Mabel Strachan), and gender nonconforming bottle of sunshine Sully (Nikko Angelo Hinayo), who also has two gay moms.

And, most importantly, Annie meets Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle) a tomboy lesbian who is not pleased to find Annie in her cottage…and looks an awful lot like Annie’s dead mother. Also, Annie ends up finding herself in a love triangle with two of the boys on the island. The first is local marina worker Ellis (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie) whose dad is played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan aka Mr. Hilarie Burton and whose mom is played by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, who is queer in real life. The second is an old classmate from her rich New Yorker life Rory (Daniel Quinn-Toye) who is there at his second home for the summer, and whose mother is played by Missi Pyle, who is very good at playing an agent of chaos.

Before this triangle gets well underway, Maple does say Annie has bi vibes, and she’s not wrong (she tells Oona her accent is hot upon meeting her, for example), and nothing is done to necessarily discount that theory. She had previously spent her entire dating life with an obviously closeted gay boyfriend and had been waiting since sixth grade for him to come out to her so they could break up, and is having a sexual awakening of sorts this summer. In fact, she talks about the fact that she wondered for a while if she might be asexual and is only now realizing maybe she isn’t. So jury’s still out on Annie. Especially since people who find themselves drawn to and surrounded by queer friends have a higher chance of realizing perhaps they were queer all along, time will tell.

When Annie gets to the island, it’s not just new friends she finds, but secrets. So many secrets. She slowly but surely learns more about her family, and herself, than she ever knew before. She also realizes that because she doesn’t have many memories of her mother, she hadn’t been properly grieving her all this time; something that’s impossible to avoid now that she’s in Sterling Point, living in the place she lived, among people who knew her. And her presence there is a bit like opening old wounds for the people who did know her mother, as she pokes around and asks questions and learns more than she bargained for.

While all this is going on, Ramona is also reckoning with the fact that she has more-than-friend feelings for Oona, and wondering if her womanizer best friend could ever see her that way. Wondering if Oona could ever date one person for more than two weeks. Wondering if anyone would want to get tangled up in her mess of a life. Their storyline is sweet and sad and beautifully done. These are two girls who had to grow up too fast, who don’t have good examples of what a good relationship should look like. Can they figure it out for themselves?

I love the way queerness is treated in this show. It’s normalized, but it’s also not ignored. Annie asks Ramona when she knew she was gay, Ramona and Oona both are prone to making jokes about being gay. It doesn’t feel like one of those shows that love to declare “the characters aren’t gay characters, they’re just characters that happen to be gay,” but instead treats their gayness as an integral part of them while also not being their ONLY character trait. On top of being gay, Ramona is also fiercely independent and slow to warm to people, bad at expressing her feelings, and also reluctantly caring and kind. Oona has deep emotional wounds she hides with flirting and humor, but also is a great big sister to Maple.

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I actually enjoyed the way all the teens were portrayed in this show. They were complicated, imperfect people. Even Annie’s love triangle didn’t have an obvious better option for her, they were just two very different boys from two very different worlds who had different things to offer her. One wasn’t secretly evil or quietly mistreating her. They were just different, and represented different parts of Annie, and she has to decide which version of herself is the real her.

I really loved this show. I loved the way it explored themes of grief and adolescence and girlhood and first relationships and emotional trauma and how scary and painful growing up can be, especially when the adults in your life have failed you. The characters feel real and relatable, despite the heightened drama that surrounds them. The actors who played the teens were absolutely incredible. Ella Rubin looks like a cross between Anne Hathaway and Julia Roberts, and she’s got the talent to match. Her friend-chemistry with Amélie Hoeferle—and really, the whole Marina Crew—felt so natural and fun to watch. Ramona and Oona’s romantic chemistry was off the charts. Annie and Connor had a great sibling dynamic with zero of the weird incest vibe too many fictional grown boy-girl twins (or sometimes even just brother-sister relationships) have on television. I love that the dialogue between the teens when they are just debriefing each other doesn’t feel too neat or tidy, or overly written. They speak with filler words and sometimes speak over each other, but in a very realistic and relatable way, not in the over-dramatic “stuttering” some sitcoms use or the overwhelming over-speak in shows that try too hard. It just felt like real young adults having real conversations. But then when the moments really matter, there are stunning monologues and arguments and emotional scenes that are written and delivered with such talent on all sides.

All of the characters have really interesting arcs, and it was great to watch them learn and grow and change over the course of the summer. The music is incredible (they even used my favorite MUNA song), and you can tell there are a lot of women behind the scenes. From creator Megan Park (The Fallout, My Old Ass) to co-showrunner Stephanie Savage (Runaways, Nancy Drew) to it being produced by Margot Robbie’s production company to a whole slew of female writers and directors. Just top to bottom a great time, and easily one of my favorite shows I’ve watched so far this year.

Sometimes a show just reaches you at the right time in the right way, and Sterling Point was that for me. I loved it more than I was expecting to, it feels like the perfect show to slip into for the summer. It’s only eight episodes long, but I felt transported to that small Canadian island for a few hours, and it was a magical feeling.

The end of the season beautifully set up future episodes, with some new information coming to light in the eleventh hour and some decisions being made whose consequences will be really interesting to watch play out, so I really hope this show gets renewed for a second season so I can go back to Sterling Point again next summer.