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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of The Great Alone returns with 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. Summer Island is a beautiful novel, funny, tender, sad, and ultimately triumphant.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of The Great Alone returns with 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. Summer Island is a beautiful novel, funny, tender, sad, and ultimately triumphant.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
From the book
An early evening rain had fallen. In the encroaching darkness, the streets of Seattle lay like mirrored strips between the glittering gray high-rises.
The dot-com revolution had changed this once quiet city, and even after the sun had set, the clattering, hammering sounds of construction beat a constant rhythm. Buildings sprouted overnight, it seemed, reaching higher and higher into the soggy sky. Purple-haired kids with nose rings and ragged clothes zipped through downtown in brand-new, bright-red Ferraris.
On a corner lot in the newly fashionable neighborhood of Belltown, there was a squat, wooden-sided structure that used to sit alone. It had been built almost one hundred years earlier, when few people had wanted to live so far from the heart of the city.
The owners of radio station KJZZ didn't care that they no longer fit in this trendy area. For fifty years they had broadcast from this lot. They had grown from a scrappy local station to Washington's largest.
Part of the reason for their current wave of success was Nora Bridge, the newest sensation in talk radio.
Although her show, Spiritual Healing with Nora, had been in syndication for less than a year, it was already a bona fide hit. Advertisers and affiliates couldn't write checks fast enough, and her weekly newspaper advice column, "Nora Knows Best," had never been more popular. It appeared in more than 2,600 papers nationwide.
Nora had started her career as a household hints adviser for a small-town newspaper, but hard work and a strong vision had moved her up the food chain. The women of Seattle had been the first to discover her unique blend of passion and morality; the rest of the country had soon followed.
Reviewers claimed that she could see a way through any emotional conflict; more often than not, they mentioned the purity of her heart.
But they were wrong. It was the impurity in her heart that made her successful. She was an ordinary woman who'd made extraordinary mistakes. She understood every nuance of need and loss.
There was never a time in her life, barely even a moment, when she didn't remember what she'd lost. What she'd thrown away. Each night she brought her own regrets to the microphone, and from that wellspring of sorrow, she found compassion.
She had managed her career with laserlike focus, carefully feeding the press a palatable past. Even the previous week when People magazine had featured her on the cover, there had been no investigative story on her life. She had covered her tracks well. Her fans knew she'd been divorced and that she had grown daughters. The hows and whys of her family's destruction remained-thankfully-private.
Tonight, Nora was on the air. She scooted her wheeled chair closer to the microphone and adjusted her headphones. A computer screen showed her the list of callers on hold. She pushed line two, which read: Marge/mother-daughter probs.
"Hello and welcome, Marge, you're on the air with Nora Bridge. What's on your mind this evening?"
"Hello . . . Nora?" The caller sounded hesitant, a little startled at actually hearing her voice on the air after waiting on hold for nearly an hour.
Nora smiled, although only her producer could see it. Her fans, she'd learned, were often anxious. She lowered her voice, gentled it. "How can I help you, my friend?"
"I'm having a little trouble with my daughter, Suki." The caller's flattened vowels identified her as a midwesterner.
"How old is Suki, Marge?"
"Sixty-seven this November."
Nora laughed. "I guess some things never change, eh, Marge?"
"Not between mothers and daughters. Suki gave me my...
About the Author-
Kristin Hannah is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of many acclaimed novels. She and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii.
Reviews-
March 1, 2001 Second-chance love of a different stripe--between mother and daughter--is the focus of Hannah's (Angel Falls) overheated family drama. More than 10 years ago, Nora Bridge walked out on her husband and two daughters. Now a wildly popular radio talk-show host and syndicated columnist, Nora offers inspirational advice that appeals to listeners' family values. What Nora's fans don't know is that her youngest daughter, Ruby, now 28, hasn't spoken to her mother in years. When a scandal breaks concerning Nora's unsavory past, Ruby, whose stand-up comedy career hasn't taken off the way she hoped it would, is hired to pen a tell-all article. Conveniently for Ruby, Nora is injured in a car accident and needs someone to accompany her to the family's former retreat on Washington's Summer Island. Once mother and daughter begin to get reacquainted, however, trading secrets, learning to see each other as people and healing the wounds of the past, Ruby isn't sure she wants to write the profile after all. Two subplots drive home the same lesson: one featuring Ruby and Dean, the young man Ruby pushed away while she was too busy hating her mother, and another involving Dean and his gay brother, Eric, now dying of cancer--conveniently, Dean and Eric are staying on a neighboring island, trying to get reacquainted. In all cases, Hannah's prescription for saving shaky relationships is the same: talk and forgiveness. The cozy sentimentality may appeal to fans of confessional talk shows--others will want to give Hannah's latest a miss. (Mar.) Forecast: Crown is backing Summer Island with a first printing of 125,000, advertising in major national publications and a teaser excerpt in Ballantine's mass market edition of Angel Falls, due out this month, but it's unlikely that this by-the-numbers offering will expand the author's reader base.
November 15, 2000 From Mystic Lake to Summer Island. Radio talk-show host Nora Bridge has it all--except the daughter she abandoned when she walked out on her marriage years ago. Now Ruby is offered a fortune to write a nasty tell-all, but first she heads for a small island off the coast of Washington to encounter her estranged mom once more.
Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
January 1, 2001 When Ruby was 16, her mother, Nora, walked out on her family, and Ruby has never forgiven her. Nora has become a famous national advice guru based in Seattle, and when the press finds out about an affair she had while still married, her career is thrown into turmoil by the scandal. Ruby, an unemployed comedian, has a chance to make some money by writing an article about her now-famous mother, whom she hasn't spoken to in 10 years, and when Nora is injured in a car accident, Ruby breaks her silence and decides to take care of her mostly as an aid to her writing project. They hole up in their old family vacation home on Summer Island off the coast of Seattle and behave like boxers coming out to spar with one another and then retreating to their corners to wait for the second round of confrontations. Ruby starts working on her article as therapy to distract her from dealing with her mother, but as the two women become accustomed to each other, Ruby starts to remember the good times and learns that she didn't really know either of her parents well enough to judge them. Nora opens up and reveals that there were serious problems in her marriage before she left. Ruby also becomes more aware of herself and of all the problems in her life that have been caused by her reaction to her childhood. Hannah has written a wonderful mother/daughter story that highlights the individuality of each strong woman and shines hope on fractured relationships.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)
Tulsa World
"A fascinating story of love, healing, forgiveness . . . certain to strike a chord in the hearts of mothers and daughters everywhere."
Library Journal
"A warm and touching story about very human characters whose personal situations come to life with realism and sensitivity."
People
"Many a daughter will see something of herself in Ruby."
The Midwest Book Review
"Totally brilliant."
Tahoe Tribune
"A beautiful novel, funny and tender, sad and wonderfully satisfying."
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