Kate Levin and her children always spend the summer at her mother’s home on Nantucket. This year, 1969, only her youngest Jessie, aged 13 is joining her. The children from her first marriage can’t make it this year: the eldest Blair is pregnant with twins and stuck at home in Boston, Kirby – the middle sister – has taken a job on Martha’s Vinyard during her summer break at college, and Tiger, her only son, has been drafted and deployed to Vietnam.
This book follows the women of the family: Kate, Blair, Kirby and Jessie.
Jessie Levin feels very alone without her siblings, she especially misses her brother Tiger and worries for his safety. She writes letters to him, but leaves out upsetting information like the tennis teacher who rubs up against her and makes her very uncomfortable. She immediately tells her grandmother, who insists she takes tennis lessons at the club, to get her another teacher – a woman.
Kirby Foley, a college student, is trying to get over a failed relationship. She falls in love with a rich black boy, but feels that his mother doesn’t think she’s good enough for him. She realises that the mother, a medical doctor, remembers her from a while back when she consulted her.
Blair Whalen (nee Foley) is married to an astrophysicist, who doesn’t allow her to work. Blair is bored out of her mind and she wants to start studying again, at Harvard, but her husband said no. Then she gets pregnant with twins, and her husband Angus grows more distant by the minute.
Kate Levin (previously Foley, nee Nichols), the mother of the three women above, is struggling with the past. Though she is now happily married to Jessie’s father David, she was quite unhappily married to Blair, Kirby and Tiger’s father Ward. We learn the truth about his death.
Overall I liked this book. I wasn’t a big fan of Kate, she seemed not interested in Jessie at all and just left her to her mother while she slept off hangover after hangover. Grandmother is not nice to Jessie, and seems upset that her favourite Kirby wasn’t there.
Kirby is an interesting character, very socially aware, very much against the war in Vietnam which she demonstrated against as well. I don’t think the story around her was fully explored though.
Jessie, who desperately misses her siblings and her friends, seems so alone. She develops a crush on the first boy who pays her attention. And when he kisses her, she assumes she’s now his girlfriend. Unfortunately, he had a not so nice surprise for her…
Read for The 52 Book Club Reading Challenge 2025
Prompt 7: Genre Two: Set in Summer
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
