Recommend books Summer Island: A Novel

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Summer Island: A Novel

★★★★

8.4

Kristin Hannah・・Ended

Updated: November 2, 2004

Content length: 448 pages

language: English

Source: amazon

8.4

Score

5★

8%

4★

25%

3★

33%

2★

8%

1★

25%

Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The renowned author of The Women presents a poignant, funny, luminous novel about a mother and daughter—the complex ties that bind them, the past that separates them, and the healing that comes with forgiveness. “[Kristin] Hannah is superb at delving into the characters’ psyches and delineating nuances of feeling.”—Washington Post Book World Years ago, Nora Bridge walked out on her marriage and left her daughters behind. She has since become a famous radio talk-show host and newspaper columnist beloved for her moral advice. Her youngest daughter, Ruby, is a struggling comedienne who uses her famous mother as fuel for her bitter, cynical humor. When the tabloids unearth a scandalous secret from Nora’s past, their estrangement suddenly becomes dramatic: Nora is injured in an accident and a glossy magazine offers Ruby a fortune to write a tell-all about her mother. Under false pretenses, Ruby returns home to take care of the woman she hasn't spoken to for almost a decade. Nora insists they retreat to Summer Island in the San Juans, to the lovely old house on the water where Ruby grew up, a place filled with childhood memories of love and joy and belonging. There Ruby is also reunited with her first love and his brother. Once, the three of them had been best friends, inseparable. Until the summer that Nora had left and everyone's hearts had been broken. . . . What began as an expose evolves, as Ruby writes, into an exploration of her family’s past. Nora is not the woman Ruby has hated all these years. Witty, wise, and vulnerable, she is desperate to reconcile with her daughter. As the magazine deadline draws near and Ruby finishes what has begun to seem to her an act of brutal betrayal, she is forced to grow up and at last to look at her mother—and herself—through the eyes of a woman. And she must, finally, allow herself to love.

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✨ Editor’s Crush — Reasons You’ll Love It

In Summer Island, Kristin Hannah takes a seemingly simple setup—a famous “perfect” radio advice host, the angry daughter who’s built a whole comedy routine out of hating her, and one scandal that blows everything up—and turns it into an aching, funny, sea-salt soft story about forgiveness. When a tabloid exposes Nora’s long-buried secret and a car accident sends her career crashing down, Ruby returns home under false pretenses, planning to write a brutal tell-all about the mother who walked out on her. Instead, on a small island in Washington State, in the weathered house where she once felt safe, Ruby stumbles back into first love, old friendships, and the messy, painful truth about what really happened in her family.

If you love emotional family dramas, complicated mother–daughter bonds, and stories where characters are deeply flawed but stubbornly lovable, this feels like a warm, slightly bittersweet summer evening in book form. It’s about secrets, abandonment, the cost of fame, and that terrifying, beautiful moment when you finally see your parents not as villains or heroes, but as human—and decide whether you’re brave enough to forgive.