Elin Hilderbrand Review

 Hello Interwebs!

So this is going to be a three part book review dedicated to the three (2.5?) Elin Hilderbrand books I read in the month of August. I've heard nothing but good things about her books and after the first one I picked up I was in love. I read two more and then I put in for another from the library which I'm planning on reading in September. Her writing is so good and after becoming immersed in this world I now plan on spending every summer in Nantucket (at least from a literary standpoint). As always each book review will contain spoilers. 

Summer of '69 by Elin Hilderbrand (2019), read August 10-16, 2020; 5 stars on goodreads. 

Summer of '69 takes place on Nantucket during the summer of 1969 and follows a family. Each chapter is written from the perspective of one of the main characters: Katherine the mother, Blair the oldest daughter, Kirby the middle daughter, and Jessie the youngest daughter. The mother is drinking continuously while trying to deal with her only son, Tiger's, deployment to Vietnam, Blair is pregnant with twins stuck in Boston in her unhappy and neglectful marriage, Kirby is spending the summer on Martha's Vineyard working, and Jessie is stuck alone with their elderly grandmother and their mother in the house on Nantucket. The family spends more time apart than together and secrets are coming out. Blair married an older astrophysicist and the brother of her teenage boyfriend, he is controlling and does not allow her to work or even leave the house and now that she's pregnant she is trapped in the house. It turns out she's pregnant with twins and her neglectful husband spends all his time at the office working on the moon landing for July. When her brother-in-law and former lover comes back just after she learns that her husband is secretly meeting a woman named Trixie, Blair kisses the brother-in-law and is caught. Her husband throws her out of the house and she ends up on Nantucket just in time for her husband to leave for Houston and her babies to be born on the eve of the moon landing. Blair's story ends up with her husband admitting Trixie is the therapist treating his mental illness and the two making up. Next is Kirby. Kirby is the wild child and tells her parents that she is going to be working housekeeping at a hotel in Martha's Vineyard but doesn't have a job yet and is renting a room in a house with other young women near where her friend is working as a nanny. She ends up working as a night desk clerk at a hotel and courting a young black man whose doctor mother helped Kirby when she was pregnant with her ex-boyfriend's baby, she ended up miscarrying instead of having the abortion and learned that her boyfriend was married. She leaves her post at the desk one night when Senator Teddy Kennedy comes back to the hotel drunk and is found out when her friend's sister who was partying with the senator ends up drowning when he crashes his car into the water. She ends up leaving Martha's Vineyard after being fired and joins her family on Nantucket. Jessie is the youngest and only the half-sister of the other children. She turns 13 at the beginning of the summer and promptly falls in love with Pick, the grandson of the house caretaker. She goes through the gamut of emotions with her first love ending in heartbreak. She spends the summer on her own and taking tennis lessons at her grandmother's prompting. Katherine, their mother is suffering after her only son, Tiger, is drafted and deployed to Vietnam. She is holding a secret about the "accidental" death of her first husband and her animosity towards Pick's mother. It turns out that Pick's mother had an affair with her first husband, making Pick her three older children's' half-brother and when she confronted him with it he killed himself. Her lawyer, now her second husband and Jessie's father, didn't know the full truth of it when he defended her claims to his life insurance but Pick's grandfather, the caretaker, helped her cover up the suicide. The book ends with all the family coming together, the mother buying their own house in Nantucket where they spend Thanksgiving with the girl Tiger proposed to from Vietnam, the grandmother adn the caretaker culminate their romance, the twins are healthy and their parents together, and everything is as it should be.

I loved Summer of '69. Each chapter title is also a song title which gave me a killer book-themed summer oldies playlist which I love. I love having playlists that are related to books I'm currently reading. The characters were all well fleshed out and had real world problems that you can relate to. The 1960s are a time period that is so much fun and I've never been to Nantucket (I'm not 100% sure which state that is...maybe Massachusetts?) but after reading this I feel like I've been there in the 1960s. All in all this was a great book and I gave it 5/5 stars. 

Summer of '79 by Elin Hilderbrand (2020) read August 22, 2020; 5/5 stars. 

This is a short 61 page novella revisiting the world and family from Summer of '69 and I found a digital copy of this book online to read. This book takes place in 1979, ten years after the previous book, when everyone comes together on Nantucket for the funeral of the grandmother. You primarily see the four children from the previous book: Blair, Kirby, Tiger, and Jessie. Blair went back to school and works as an English professor. Things never improved with her husband and she has since divorced him and is living as a single mother of 10 year old twins. Her love life is nonexistent but she seemed much happier than she was in the first book. Kirby is single and living a crazy writer's life in the big city. She's still the free spirit and still alone. Tiger married his fiancee Magee but the two of them, despite being very happy together, are having fertility problems despite there being no medical reason for it. Finally Jessie is 23 and is working on her law degree like her father. This book was just a nice interlude into the family dynamic and how things turned out for each of them set against the backdrop of the grandmother's death who everyone had a love-hate relationship with. It was nothing real big or groundbreaking but I really enjoyed this and having the questions I had at the end of the book answered (like whether Tiger survives Vietnam). Also a great read and a 5 star book. 

28 Summers by Elin Hilderbrand (2020), read August 22-26, 2020, 4.5 stars.

This book I have feelings about and I keep debating my rating for it: is it a 4 or a 4.5 star read. This book starts with Summer 28 which is the summer of 2020 where Mallory is dying. As she's languishing in her bed at home after hospice gets involved she tells her son, Link, about an envelope in her desk and tells him to follow the instructions. In the envelope is the name and phone number of Jake McCloud, whose wife Ursula is running for president. Then the book takes us back to Summer 1 in the early 1990s when Mallory meets Jake when he comes to her Nantucket beach cottage with her brother and another friend for her brother's bachelor party. Things happen and when Mallory and Jake are left alone they have a summer fling which includes watching the movie, Same Time Next Year, about a couple that meets once a year despite being married to other people. Jake and Mallory decide to make their long Labor Day weekend their own Same Time Next Year and the book progresses from there. The two of them meet at Mallory's cottage on Nantucket every labor day weekend despite his marriage to Ursula, both of them having children of their own, love affairs, jobs, her brother's four or five marriages, and even the tragic deaths of her parents until Ursula finds out about it before announcing her presidential bid and tells Mallory to stop it. Mallory's prior skin cancer comes back but spreads to her brain and sends her to her deathbed the summer after her son's first year at college. The book ends with Jake coming to the cottage to say goodbye to her, along with her brother and her son's father. I liked the book and the format where  you get a snippet or two from one or both of them at some point during the year that summer takes place. Sometimes it takes place during the weekend they spend together and sometimes its other big events during that year. My biggest issue is that I didn't care for Mallory. She spent her whole life pining for Jake and although she had her son via a one-night-stand with her brother's best friend she never has a relationship that survives longer than a year. She lives alone on her island and it seemed to me that Jake got a lot more out of the relationship than she does. This story kind of also reminded me of the relationship I have with my own boyfriend. We've known each other since we were 12 and have dated off and on since our senior year of high school before moving in about 18 months ago and having our son about a year ago. So I related to Jake's relationship with his wife who he'd known forever and dated since they were 15 but I also related to his relationship with Mallory and the sense that they just kept missing each other and it not being the right time. All in all the book was enjoyable and I don't regret reading it.

All in all I love Elin Hilderbrand's writing so, so much. She has a vibrant engaging writing style that takes you to Nantucket in the summertime and makes you a part of the families she writes about. I'm excited to read the rest of her books (I have Winter in Paradise from the library right now) and I highly recommend them as quick, light, family drama reads. 

Happy Reading!

Richelle and Emma