Summerland by Elin Hilderbrand

Summerland by Elin Hilderbrand

400 pages

Published June 2012 by Little, Brown and Company

Publisher's Summary: 

A warm June evening, a local tradition: the students of Nantucket High have gathered for a bonfire on the beach. What begins as a graduation night celebration ends in tragedy after a horrible car crash leaves the driver, Penny Alistair, dead, and her twin brother in a coma. The other passengers, Penny's boyfriend, Jake, and her friend Demeter, are physically unhurt—but the emotional damage is overwhelming. Questions linger about what happened before Penny took the wheel.

As summer unfolds, startling truths are revealed about the survivors and their parents, the secrets kept, promises broken, and hearts betrayed.

My Thoughts: 

I read my first Elin Hilderbrand book last fall, The Five-Star Weekend. You may recall I wasn't a fan and wasn't sure I'd read more of her work. But as I mentioned then, I own at least one of her books on my Nook and when I saw the cover of this one, I thought it might be perfect for the summer. It looks bright and light, does it not? 

I'd say it's a spoiler alert to tell you that this book is not, in fact, bright and light. But you'll know that if you've read the summary; clearly I had, once again, not read the summary before I launched into the book. 

Imagine that you're Penny's mother, who considered Penny her best friend. She is devastated, but needs to focus on her son, Hobby, who is shattered in the accident in ways that will change his life. Imagine, too, that there are a lot of questions as to why your daughter seems to have intentionally driven her boyfriend's vehicle over a cliff and what got said to her to upset her so much just before she got behind the wheel. Add to that the fact that Penny's boyfriend's father is also the man Penny's mom has been having a years long affair with - a man whose wife is deep in mourning still four years after the death of the baby she'd wanted for years before he was finally born. And Demeter, whose purse was found in the wreckage of the vehicle with a nearly empty bottle of whiskey, who knows what made Penny so upset, who has no friends other than the three that were in the vehicle with her? She's about to spiral out of control without her parents having the slightest clue. 

Yeah, there's a lot going on here. Especially when you add in the fact that Nantucket is a relatively small town, where everyone knows everyone. It seems to make the healing more difficult instead of easier. 

Is it a perfect read? No. There were parts I thought dragged, maybe too much going on. But I was able to empathize with all of the characters and thought the relationships played out well. Even as dark as most of it is, I'm not giving anything away when I saw that things work out as well as they can. And, surprisingly for me, that's exactly what I wanted.