Nantucket Sisters

Nantucket Sisters 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 between Maggie McIntyre and Emma Hudson, two girls who grow up on Nantucket together but whose backgrounds and life paths take them in very different directions across the decades. Maggie is from a working class Nantucket family with deep year round island roots, while Emma is the daughter of summer visitors whose wealthy mainland life sits at the opposite end of the social spectrum from Maggie’s island upbringing. Their friendship develops across childhood summers despite the class differences and continues as they grow into adulthood, with the various complications of each woman’s adult life testing the bond they have built.

The novel weaves together the friendship narrative with the romantic complications that develop for both Maggie and Emma across the years. The men they fall for, the marriages they enter, the careers they build, and the various disappointments and triumphs they encounter all unfold against the constant backdrop of their friendship and the Nantucket setting that has shaped both of their lives. Nancy Thayer handles the dual character structure with care, giving both Maggie and Emma enough perspective to feel like fully developed characters rather than plot pieces, and the friendship between them develops with the kind of careful psychological work that her best fiction shows.

The Nantucket setting is rendered with the kind of specific detail that only an actual island resident can produce. The class differences between year round island residents and summer visitors give Thayer room to explore the wider social dynamics of a place where the seasonal economy has shaped the island culture for generations. 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 and friendships are written with the kind of warmth that allows them to be flawed without being unlikeable.

For longtime Nancy Thayer fans, Nantucket Sisters is one of her stronger entries. For new readers, the novel is a fair introduction to her style.