The Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand

The Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand

Read by Erin Bennett

12 hours, 45 minutes

Published June 2023 by Little, Brown and Company

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Publisher’s Summary: 

Hollis Shaw’s life seems picture-perfect. She’s the creator of the popular food blog Hungry with Hollis and is married to Matthew, a dreamy heart surgeon. But after she and Matthew get into a heated argument one snowy morning, he leaves for the airport and is killed in a car accident. The cracks in Hollis’s perfect life—her strained marriage and her complicated relationship with her daughter, Caroline—grow deeper.

So when Hollis hears about something called a “Five-Star Weekend”—one woman organizes a trip for her best friend from each phase of her life: her teenage years, her twenties, her thirties, and midlife—she decides to host her own Five-Star Weekend on Nantucket. But the weekend doesn’t turn out to be a joyful Hallmark movie.

The husband of Hollis’s childhood friend Tatum arranges for Hollis’s first love, Jack Finigan, to spend time with them, stirring up old feelings. Meanwhile, Tatum is forced to play nice with abrasive and elitist Dru-Ann, Hollis’s best friend from UNC Chapel Hill. Dru-Ann’s career as a prominent Chicago sports agent is on the line after her comments about a client’s mental health issues are misconstrued online. Brooke, Hollis’s friend from their thirties, has just discovered that her husband is having an inappropriate relationship with a woman at work. Again! And then there’s Gigi, a stranger to everyone (including Hollis) who reached out to Hollis through her blog. Gigi embodies an unusual grace and, as it hap- pens, has many secrets.

My Thoughts: 

Is it possible this really is my first Elin Hilderbrand book? I think it may be. I know she has legions of fans and has written 28 (or 30, depending on what site you look at) books and I’m pretty sure I own at least one on my Nook* (undoubtedly bought based on a friend’s recommendation). 

I’m sure you’ve noticed, if you’ve been reading this blog for very many years, I’m not a big beach reads reader. Consequently, I can’t speak to how this one stands up to any of Hilderbrand’s other books or, for that matter, any other beach read. These are, as always, just my opinions. 

• Hilderbrand seems to want to check off all of the boxes. Black character? Check. Asian character? Check. Gay people? Check. One Goodreads reviewer really didn’t like this book at all, in part because of this and the “wokeness” of the book. To me, it just felt like Hilderbrand was trying to appeal to everyone, which is really hard to do well. 
• Hollis knows all of these women. She knows how many of them feel about some of the others. She does NOT know one of them in real life at all…honestly it didn’t feel like she knew her all that well as an online friend, either. And still she fully expected that they would all just have a great time together over the weekend. Spoiler alert: they don’t. 
• I could 100% have done without the old love interest appearing in the book and the book would have been better without him. And I would have liked Hollis better without him – it all felt so much like the behavior of high school kids. 
• There’s a lot of brand name dropping. 
• There’s a lot of talk about food. Which I enjoyed but it made me hungry all of the time. I can’t help but wonder if there are some delicious recipes thrown into the end of the print copy of this book. 
• I wasn’t a fan of most of the women, at least until later in the book when things began to resolve (no give away there – you all know that will happen because of the kind of book this is). So their behavior really annoyed me when they were letting petty things and past grievances impact a weekend that was supposed to be about helping their friend. 
• I did appreciate Hilderbrand’s take on social media: things aren’t always what they seem, we are often too quick to think of the people we “meet” there as people we truly know, and things can get blown way out of proportion and spread all too quickly (often causing real harm). 
• Erin Bennett does a fine job of reading the book and capturing the voices of so many people. 
• And the food – did I mention the food? Good golly, I want to get into the kitchen and pull out my cookbooks! 

Kirkus Reviews says “Hilderbrand always gets it right.” On the other hand, Goodreads reviewers by and large seem disappointed with this one. Which makes me feel better and more willing to try another Hilderbrand. 

*Actually I own two – 2009’s The Castaways and 2012’s Summerland