Moon Shell Beach

Moon Shell Beach 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 long friendship and complicated reconnection between Lexi Laney and Clare Hart. The two women had been inseparable best friends growing up on Nantucket, with their bond formed at the small private cove they had named Moon Shell Beach. Their friendship had broken apart over a betrayal during their senior year of high school, and Lexi had left the island for a successful career and a life on the mainland in the years since. Now Lexi is returning to Nantucket to open her own restaurant, and her sudden reappearance forces both women to confront what had actually happened between them and whether the friendship can be rebuilt after the years of silence.

The wider plot weaves the friendship reconciliation with the standard Nantucket romance and family complications that Thayer’s readers expect. Both Lexi and Clare have current romantic situations that the reunion is going to disrupt. Their families have their own ongoing dynamics that the various plot threads pull through. And the small year round Nantucket community that has been watching this particular friendship and its breakdown for years has its own opinions about what is happening.

Nancy Thayer handles the dual character structure with care, giving both Lexi and Clare 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 Moon Shell Beach setting itself, the small private cove that gave the novel its title and that had been the central physical space of the original friendship, becomes a recurring symbol across the page count.

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, Moon Shell Beach is a satisfying entry. For new readers, the novel is a fair introduction to her style.