Island Girls

Island Girls 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 three half sisters who reunite at their late father’s Nantucket house under the conditions of his unusual will. Rory Randall, a difficult and complicated man in life, has stipulated that his three daughters from his three different marriages must spend the summer together at the Nantucket house before any of them can inherit. The three sisters are not close. They have very different relationships with their late father, with each other, and with the wider Randall family history that the summer together is going to force them to confront.

Arden Randall is the daughter from Rory’s first marriage, a successful Boston television personality whose career and personal life have been built around very different priorities than her sisters’. Meg Randall is the daughter from the second marriage, an academic whose careful professional life has insulated her from the family drama her sisters have lived with more directly. Jenny Randall is the youngest, the daughter from the third marriage, whose relationship with their late father had been the warmest of the three and whose recent personal complications make the Nantucket summer a difficult one for reasons beyond just the family situation.

Nancy Thayer handles the multigenerational family structure with care, giving each of the three sisters 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.

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, Island Girls is a comfortable summer read. For new readers, the novel is a fair introduction to her style.