Girls of Summer

Girls of Summer is one of Nancy Thayer’s Nantucket novels, set on the Massachusetts island 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 novel follows the Hudson family across one Nantucket summer. Lisa Hudson is a divorced restaurant owner in her early fifties, finally building the kind of life she has been working toward since her marriage ended years earlier. Her two adult children Juliet and Theo are both home for the summer, each dealing with their own complications. Juliet, a successful tech entrepreneur, is reconsidering whether the Silicon Valley career she has built actually fits the life she wants. Theo, a recent college graduate working as a sailing instructor on the island, is figuring out what to do with himself after a relationship ended badly. Across the summer, the Hudson family deals with new romances, old tensions, and the kind of slow building decisions that summer on a small island tends to force.

Nancy Thayer handles the multigenerational family structure with care, giving each of the Hudsons enough perspective to feel like fully developed characters rather than plot pieces. The Nantucket setting is rendered with the kind of specific detail that only an actual island resident can produce. The summer rhythms of the place, with its tides and its tourists and its small year round community, give the novel its particular flavor. The girls of summer of the title points to the women across the generations of the Hudson family whose stories the novel follows.

What distinguishes Thayer from a lot of writers in her general territory is the affection she clearly feels for her setting and her characters. The Nantucket of her novels is a real place rendered with specific detail, not just a postcard backdrop, and her families are written with the kind of warmth that allows them to be flawed without being unlikeable.

For longtime Nancy Thayer fans, Girls of Summer is a comfortable summer read that delivers the kind of warm island fiction her readers expect. For new readers, the novel is a fair introduction to her style. Readers who enjoy Elin Hilderbrand’s Nantucket novels will find similar pleasure here.