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. 

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

Every Summer After by Carley Fortune

Every Summer After by Carley Fortune

Published November 2022 by Penguin Publishing Group

Read by AJ Bridel

9 hours, 38 minutes

Publisher's Summary: 

They say you can never go home again, and for Persephone Fraser, ever since she made the biggest mistake of her life a decade ago, that has felt too true. Instead of glittering summers on the lakeshore of her childhood, she spends them in a stylish apartment in the city, going out with friends, and keeping everyone a safe distance from her heart.

Until she receives the call that sends her racing back to Barry's Bay and into the orbit of Sam Florek-the man she never thought she'd have to live without.

For six summers, through hazy afternoons on the water and warm summer nights working in his family's restaurant and curling up together with books-medical textbooks for him and work-in-progress horror short stories for her-Percy and Sam had been inseparable. Eventually that friendship turned into something breathtakingly more, before it fell spectacularly apart.

When Percy returns to the lake for Sam's mother's funeral, their connection is as undeniable as it had always been. But until Percy can confront the decisions she made and the years she's spent punishing herself for them, they'll never know whether their love might be bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past.

Told over the course of six years and one weekend, Every Summer After is a big, sweeping nostalgic story of love and the people and choices that mark us forever.

My Thoughts: 

Would I be happy to work from home every day? Sure; I'd love to work in my pj's, avoid rush hour traffic, and eat hot lunches. But if I did that, then I wouldn't get to talk to book people every day. In my department of seven, three of us are avid readers who talk a lot about books and we've gotten to know each other's tastes well enough to have a pretty good idea what the others might enjoy. So when one of them recommended this book, I didn't hesitate to check it out. She didn't sell it as high fiction; she sold it as chick lit and some depth, but also light enough to break up the heavier reads. 

Which is exactly what this book is. You have to be willing to buy into the idea that a couple of childhood friends will develop such a deep love for each other than twelve years after they last saw each other, both are still incapable of falling in love with anyone else. To be honest, I did have to remind myself periodically to let go of the idea that the premise was highly unlikely and just go with the flow. Is Sam too often a little too perfect? Yes, also that. But Fortune has him mishandle things just often enough that he still feels human. Did it seem strange that Sam's mom and Percy's parents, who never seemed to spend that much time together in the summer, suddenly decide to spend holidays together. Yes; it probably would have helped to talk about them sitting on the deck having cocktails, watching the kids swim. But Fortune needed a way to have Sam and Percy spend more time together beyond just the summers so, again, you just have to go with it. And did I figure out what the big revel at the end was ahead of time. Yeah, I did (and you know how rare that is!). But I was still, to be fair, disappointed in Percy when it was revealed. 

But I loved the way Fortune described Barry's Bay and life there. I could vividly picture the lake, the houses, the lifestyle, the kind of bond two kids could develop over a summer spent living together in a world apart from real life. And I'd always prefer a relationship to develop from friendship, rather than the kind where two people bicker throughout the book (or show, or movie) and then suddenly succumb to deep passion. 

So, no, it's not high literature. But it's always fun to read a book set in the summer, with plenty of references to books, that you can just race through. AJ Brindel does a great job of handling all of the various voices and really adds to the book. Oh! One more thing! Midway through my listening, the coworker who recommended the book was talking to my other reading coworker about how this book has some depth and I said, "yeah, and plenty of sex!" Which she, not all that long after having read the book, didn't even recall! She read it for the romance and that's what she got! Which is exactly what you want in a book like this - to get exactly what you want from it. 

Cover Reveal - Mary Kay Andrews' The Newcomer

You all know how much I love and fiercely hang on to summer. So even though it's September now, I'm not above looking forward to next summer just as summer 2020 has come to a close.

THE NEWCOMER by @Mary Kay Andrews will be making the scene next May as the first beach read of the season! It's never to early to start thinking about your summer 2021 reading! I know my sister, who is a big fan of Andrews, will certainly be adding this to her reading list. Hopefully, you'll even be able to sit on the beach safely next summer while you're reading this one! So, mark your calendars for May 4, 2021 when @St. Martin’s Press will release MKA’s 28^th novel! Summer begins—and never ends—with Mary Kay Andrews! Pre-order NOW! http://bit.ly/TheNewcomerBook 

#TheNewcomer #coverreveal #summerneverendswithmka #tandemliterary 

 

SYNOPSIS: Letty can't forget her sister Tara's insistence: “if anything bad ever happens to me, it's Eli. Promise me you'll take Maya and run. Promise me.” With Tara found dead in her glamorous New York City townhome, Letty Carnahan is on the run with her four-year-old niece, Maya, in tow. Tara left behind one clue—a faded magazine story about a sleepy mom-and-pop motel on Florida's Gulf Coast. So, Letty and Maya find themselves at The Murmuring Surf—the suspicious newcomers amidst a quarrelsome group of snowbird regulars. As Letty tries to settle into her new life and heal Maya's trauma, she's preoccupied as her late sister's troubled past and connection to the motel are revealed. And then there’s that attractive detective and his unwelcome advances. Will he betray Letty’s confidence, or is he her next shot at love?