Summerland
Elin Hilderbrand, 2012
Little, Brown & Co.
464
ISBN-13: 9780316099943
Summary
A summer's night, a deadly crash, and four lives changed forever—in the page-turning bestseller from Elin Hilderbrand.
A warm June evening, a local tradition: the students of Nantucket High have gathered for a bonfire on the beach. What begins as a graduation night celebration ends in tragedy after a horrible car crash leaves the driver, Penny Alistair, dead, and her twin brother in a coma.
The other passengers, Penny's boyfriend, Jake, and her friend Demeter, are physically unhurt—but the emotional damage is overwhelming. Questions linger about what happened before Penny took the wheel.
As summer unfolds, startling truths are revealed about the survivors and their parents—secrets kept, promises broken, hearts betrayed. Elin Hilderbrand explores the power of community, family, and honesty, and proves that even from the ashes of sorrow new love can take flight. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969-70
• Raised—Collegeville, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Hopkins University; University of Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Currently—lives in Nantucket, Massachuestts
Elin Hilderbrand is an American writer of Summer beach read romance novels, some 20 in all. Her books have been set on and around Nantucket Island where she lives with her husband and three children.
Hilderbrand was born and raised in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. As a child, she spent summers on Cape Cod, "playing touch football at low tide, collecting sea glass, digging pools for hermit crabs, swimming out to the wooden raft off shore," until her father died in a plane crash when she was sixteen. She spent the next summer working—doing piecework in a factory that made Halloween costumes; she promised herself that the goal for the rest of her life would be that she would always have a real summer.
She graduated from Johns Hopkins University and became a teaching/writing fellow at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1993 she moved to Nantucket, took a job as "the classified ads girl" at a local paper, and later started writing.
Her first novels were published by St. Martin's Press. With A Summer Affair, published in 2008, she moved to Little, Brown and Company. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/11/2013.)
Book Reviews
Nantucket Island’s year-round residents are shaken when a car crash claims the life of driver Penny Alistair, a vibrant and popular high school student, and leaves her twin brother, Hobby, in a coma..... The sparks that this story throws out becomes a current that circles the agitated kids and their parents, electrifying the atmosphere as they grapple with what happened. Hilderbrand has a gift for building tension, and the reader will be willing to do just about anything to discover the real reason why Penny would drive herself, her brother, and her boyfriend over an embankment into oblivion.
Publishers Weekly
Hildebrand's latest touches on heavy subject matter but has a satisfying conclusion. Like Jodi Picoult, she writes about ordinary, believable characters in a difficult situation that could happen to anyone. While the multiple points of view are tough to follow at first, once the story "clicks," fans of realistic fiction will find themselves devouring this novel to discover what really happened that night on the beach. —Amber Woodard, Cumberland Univ. Lib., Lebanon, TN
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. What do you think of the use of Nantucket’s collective voice in Summerland ? How does the island—and the voice of its people—play its own role in the novel?
2. Following the tragic accident, Jordan decides to move his family to Australia for a year, even though Jake does not want to leave the island. For whom did Jordan make that decision? Why?
3. How would you describe Penny’s relationship with Ava? Should Ava have realized something more serious was wrong with Penny? What did Ava provide Penny that no one else could?
4. What do you think of Jordan’s decision not to run a story about the accident in the Nantucket Standard ? Do you think he made the right choice?
5. Throughout the novel, many characters struggle with guilt over the cause of the car accident, including Demeter and Jake. Do you think Penny was solely responsible for the accident? Or was anyone else at fault? Why or why not?
6. Penny had a very sensitive soul. What did she struggle with? Was she determined to end her life?
7. Perth and Nantucket are both coastal towns, but they are a world apart. How does life differ in these two places? What do Jordan and Jake learn from their time in Perth?
8. What caused Demeter to start drinking in an unhealthy way? What led her to continue her drinking, and what were the consequences?
9. What sparked Ava’s reawakening, and what led to her big decisions at the end of the novel?
10. What do you think of Hobby’s decision to keep Demeter’s secret news to himself? Do you think that’s something he should have shared with others?
11. How are the lives of the parents in the novel influenced by the lives of their children—and vice versa?
12. How does each character in Summerland find a way to start healing as the summer draws to a close?
(Questions issued by publisher.)