Summer Breeze

Summer Breeze is one of Nancy Thayer’s Nantucket novels, set on the Massachusetts island that has been her literary home for decades. The novel follows multiple connected characters through one Nantucket summer, with the various romantic, family, and community plot threads that Thayer’s multigenerational fiction reliably delivers unfolding against the constant backdrop of the island setting.

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 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, Summer Breeze is a comfortable summer read. 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.