Summer Island: A Novel
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The author of the cherished bestseller On Mystic Lake returns with a poignant, funny, luminous novel about a mother and daughter--the complex ties that bind them, the past that separates them, and the healing that comes with forgiveness. "[Kristin] Hannah is superb at delving into the characters' psyches and delineating nuances of feeling."--Washington Post Book World Years ago, Nora Bridge walked out on her marriage and left her daughters behind. She has since become a famous radio talk-show host and newspaper columnist beloved for her moral advice. Her youngest daughter, Ruby, is a struggling comedienne who uses her famous mother as fuel for her bitter, cynical humor. When the tabloids unearth a scandalous secret from Nora's past, their estrangement suddenly becomes dramatic: Nora is injured in an accident and a glossy magazine offers Ruby a fortune to write a tell-all about her mother. Under false pretenses, Ruby returns home to take care of the woman she hasn't spoken to for almost a decade. Nora insists they retreat to Summer Island in the San Juans, to the lovely old house on the water where Ruby grew up, a place filled with childhood memories of love and joy and belonging. There Ruby is also reunited with her first love and his brother. Once, the three of them had been best friends, inseparable. Until the summer that Nora had left and everyone's hearts had been broken. . . . What began as an expose evolves, as Ruby writes, into an exploration of her family's past. Nora is not the woman Ruby has hated all these years. Witty, wise, and vulnerable, she is desperate to reconcile with her daughter. As the magazine deadline draws near and Ruby finishes what has begun to seem to her an act of brutal betrayal, she is forced to grow up and at last to look at her mother--and herself--through the eyes of a woman. And she must, finally, allow herself to love. Summer Island is a beautiful novel, funny, tender, sad, and ultimately triumphant.
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Community Reviews
Can’t believe this is the same woman who wrote The Nightingale and The Four Winds. This family drama novel does not resemble Kristin Hannah’s later works at all… as cheesy as a Hallmark movie.
“Today I talked to my mother. This is a remarkably ordinary sentence for a truly revolutionary act.” After her mother leaves her family to become a celebrity talk-show host, Ruby Bridge’s fear of abandonment calcifies in her bones. “It’s hard to say when my feelings for my mother changed from guilt to anger to disgust to hatred, but that was the arc of it…From the hard stone of everything that happened, I carved the image of a woman and called it mother…I’ve kept it on my bedside table…visible only in my own mind. The statue was a collection of hard edges–selfishness, lies, and abandonment.”
“Girl hates mother…girl learns to love mother…girl gives up career to keep from breaking her mother’s heart.” Kristin Hannah’s Summer Island is a modern day parable of a prodigal mother and daughter. “As mothers and daughters, we are connected with one another. My mother is in the bones of my spine, keeping me straight and true. She is in my blood, making sure it runs rich and strong. She is in the beating of my heart…On Summer Island, I became complete…I went in search of my mother’s life, and found my own.” Summer Island is “a beautiful, powerful portrait of who we are, and it shows who we can be, both of us. It shows how love can go wrong, and how it can find its way back to the beginning if you believe in it.”
Kristin Hannah lets “the words string out, find one another, and connect.” Like threads, she weaves them together, sews a quilt from the strands of her characters’ lives, and tucks them around her readers’ imaginations. By the last page, readers are “reaching for tissues and thinking about how to find their way back to their own families. The smart ones are reaching for the telephone. There’s no substitute for talking to the people you love.”
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