Summer on the Island by Brenda Novak
Publication Date: April 5th 2022 by Mira Books
Pages: 400
Source: Publisher
Rating: ★★★★
My
Thoughts:
Marlow is back on Teach, an island off the coast of Miami, after
her father’s death to help her mother pack up his stuff. She’s also there for a
much-needed break with her two friends Aida and Claire. After closing down her law practice, Marlow is
mulling over what she’d like to do next, so she’s there indefinitely. Seclusion has always been her favorite of the
family’s houses and now her mother is condensing and planning on living on
Teach full-time. But part of the past is regret over how she treated Walker, the
housekeeper’s son. He had a wild crush on her and being young, immature, and
selfish she wasn’t very nice about it, something she deeply regrets.
Walker, now the Chief of Police for Teach, plans on keeping his
distance from Marlow. He has no plans of repeating the past by fawning over her
now. However, it seems life has other plans.
Walker and Marlow’s romance was a long time coming with him
pining over her while they were teenagers. Unrequited love is one of my
favorite tropes, so it was a pleasure to see Marlow, while trying to make
amends, fall hard for Walker. They started off with a little bit angry, passionate
encounters that lit up the pages! Of course, they couldn’t stay angry with each
other for long.
There’s also the fallout after Marlow finds out her father
wasn’t the saint she thought, a blow to her mother as well. And then there’s
Aida and Claire, her two friends that joined her for the Summer. Aida met
Claire when Claire found out she was seeing a married man, Aida’s husband. I had
to scratch my head over that storyline. Not sure I could be friends with my
husband’s ex-mistress, even if she didn’t know she was seeing a married man! There’s some kerfuffle with that situation as
things are not as resolved as they think.
Summer on the Island was part women’s fiction, part
romance (my favorite part, of course!) with a little bit of danger mixed in the
end, and I enjoyed every bit of it!
4 Stars
About the book:
For fans of Elin Hilderbrand and Nancy Thayer, New York Times bestselling author Brenda Novak's newest standalone novel about friendship, family and the ties that bind and challenge us follows three friends as they escape to a coastal Florida town for the summer.
Marlo Madsen has just been through a global pandemic that turned her life—and the lives of almost everyone she knows—upside down. Her beloved father has died from COVID. Helping her mother, who has MS, handle his estate means returning to the small coastal Florida town where she was raised.
Having just left her job as a divorce attorney—which paid well but showed her too much of the worst in people—she’s invited two friends to join her for a seaside summer. The two friends are also facing huge life changes after the worsening California wildfires took everything from them, and need to decompress and recuperate. And travel has long been forbidden, so they are beyond appreciative for the ability to escape.
Unfortunately, a restful summer doesn’t seem to be in the cards, especially when Marlo learns about a special provision in her father’s will that reveals he has a love child with Rosemarie, the housekeeper who’s worked for the family for years. Rosemarie’s son was around while Marlo was growing up, but she never suspected a thing. Nobody did. And once the news is revealed, the fallout will cause waves big enough to topple two families and a whole community.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Brenda Novak, a New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author, has penned over sixty novels. She is a five-time nominee for the RITA Award and has won the National Reader's Choice, the Bookseller's Best, the Bookbuyer's Best, and many other awards. She also runs Brenda Novak for the Cure, a charity to raise money for diabetes research (her youngest son has this disease). To date, she’s raised $2.5 million. For more about Brenda, please visit www.brendanovak.com.
Connect with Brenda Novak:
