An Island Christmas

An Island Christmas is one of Nancy Thayer’s holiday novels set on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket that has been her literary home for decades. Thayer has written more than thirty novels with Nantucket as their primary setting, and her readers come back to her for the consistent atmosphere of the place and for the multigenerational family dramas she handles with practiced skill. The Christmas entries in her catalogue have a particular flavor, combining the year round Nantucket world she has built with the specific traditions and emotional weight of the holiday season on the island.

The novel follows the Snow family through the holiday season on Nantucket. Jilly Snow has been planning her daughter Felicia’s Christmas wedding for months, but Felicia arrives on the island with a difficult announcement. She is having second thoughts about her fiance, and she is attracted to her best man instead. The wedding preparations have to continue while the bride works through what is actually happening, and the rest of the family, including Jilly’s husband George and her younger daughter Lauren, get pulled into the kind of holiday emotional weather that Thayer specializes in rendering with both warmth and honest difficulty.

What distinguishes Thayer from a lot of writers in her general territory is the affection she clearly feels for her setting. The Nantucket of her novels is a real place rendered with specific detail, not just a postcard backdrop. The off season character of the island, very different from the summer crowd that fills her seasonal novels, gives the Christmas books their particular quality. The gray December days, the empty beaches, the small year round community that knows each other deeply, all of it grounds the romance and family drama in a place that feels lived in.

For longtime Nancy Thayer fans, An Island Christmas is a comfortable holiday read that delivers the kind of warm island fiction her readers expect. For new readers, the novel is a fair introduction to her style and a good entry point into her wider Nantucket catalogue. Readers who enjoy Elin Hilderbrand’s Nantucket novels will find similar pleasure here, though Thayer’s voice is slightly quieter than Hilderbrand’s high gloss summer fiction.