Summer Island

Kristin Hannah is one of my go tos for a good read. I wanted a good light summer read. This book wasn’t at all what I expected from the title, but it was so good. It touches on how complicated family relationships can be. This book brought out so many emotions in me and was just a great read.

I felt a lot of myself in this book. Our pasts are just that…the past. If we can’t work through the hurt, we carry it around with us until the end. This is a story of a broken family that learns what life truly has to offer. Thank you Kristen Hannah for sharing your talent with us all.

delightful story.. Kristin Hannah is a very talented writer and her stories always take place in the NW.

I didn't know what to expect with this book. I own all of Kristin Hannah's books and love them all, each for different reasons. This book was very special. I love the mother/daughters relationship. I love how complex the characters were and how there were no real clear-cut good and bad people in the relationships... how sometimes, choices give way to unforeseen consequences.For those who have read Kristin Hannah's other books, you know she often has recurrent characters in her books. Val and Julien (from Home Again and Angel Falls) make a cameo. It is a tear-jerker but not because of the life-altering moments of the book, but there are such quiet, sneak-up-on-you scenes that really touched me. It's the quiet details that really make a book more complex and extraordinary.

Mother/daughter relationships can be strained or loving. They are both in Kristin Hannah's "Summer Island," a story of relationships, of rancor and forgiveness. Joyce Bean gives a subtly nuanced reading of this family drama. Ruby has never forgiven Nora, the mother who deserted her. Years later Nora has achieved success - she's a nationally syndicated columnist and talk show host whose advice is steeped in old-fashioned family values. On the other hand, Ruby's career as a comedian is going nowhere but down. When news leaks about Nora's past, Ruby has an opportunity to make a tidy sum by writing a tell-all tale. However, accidents do happen, and Nora is injured in one. She needs someone to take her to the family's former island retreat. Thus, Ruby and Nora are thrown together after all the years of bitterness. Will their physical closeness bring about an emotional rapprochement?

SUMMER ISLAND is Kristin Hannah's best book. I'm usually a tough audience for this type of "women's fiction" because I don't like feeling that I'm being manipulated into reaching for the Kleenex, but this book didn't manipulate me; it transported me into the minds and emotions of its characters. I found myself swept away to SUMMER ISLAND where a mother and daughter rediscover each other and the selves they thought they'd lost forever. This is a book about relationships, a book about the unbreakable ties that bind families and friends together, and a book about how short and precious this life really is and how very little time we can afford to waste. Not only is Kristin a consummate storyteller, she is also an exquisite writer who is able to use the simplest of words to capture the most complex of emotions. Ruby and Nora Bridge are characters I won't soon forget and SUMMER ISLAND is a book that definitely deserves to be on all the "Best of..." lists for 2001.