The Nature of Things

Elin Hilderbrand really does represent the gold standard when it comes to beach novels. Last summer I read her Summer of '69 and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I was looking forward to reading her 2020 entry to her beach oeuvre. She did not disappoint.  28 Summers begins in 1993. No, actually that's wrong. It begins with the ending and so we know up front that Mallory Blessing will die much too young from cancer in 2020. But after introducing us to Mallory on her deathbed, she takes us back to 1993 where it all began. Mallory, a Baltimore girl, had been living quite unhappily in New York with her best childhood friend. Her life was going nowhere and she was looking for a way out. That way out came from a most unexpected direction. An aunt dies and bequeaths to Mallory her summer cottage on Nantucket, a cottage where Mallory had spent many happy summers growing up. She takes possession but knows right away that this will not be a summer cottage for her; this will be her permanent h...

I actually remember the summer of '69. I remember the excitement of watching on a black and white television screen as Neil Armstrong took his "one small step" into history, fulfilling President Kennedy's promise that we would go to the moon in that decade. I remember it and so it's hard for me to think of a novel about that time as "historical fiction" and yet I suppose that is what we must call Elin Hilderbrand's Summer of '69 . It was, in fact, fifty years ago this summer. In addition to being historical fiction, this is what I would call a great summer read, a great beach book even. After all, much of its action takes place on the beaches of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, places about which Hilderbrand seems to write instinctively. One feels that she knows them well. Kate Levin, the wife of Boston lawyer David, takes her family to her mother's Nantucket beach house every summer for three months, but in '69 some members of that f...