[.ca] Nantucket Nights (ISBN 0312989768)

Wonderful Nantucket:
Excellent Read - My wife and I go to Nantucket every summer and we can't wait to get there and read Ellen's newest book while we are there.

Why indeed:
Like another reviewer, I, too, wonder why I even read this book. It's mostly a transition book to get me from one great book to another which was on order and so I suppose that's the main reason. There is nothing complex about this story. Silly, perhaps, but not complicated. The story itself is ridiculous and the characterizations are absurd. Kayla and Raoul are shadows of real people; their son, Theo, an overdramatization of a young boy in love with an older woman who has mysteriously disappeared. These are the things that bother me about this book: 1) Kayla throws glasses into the ocean after Antoinette disappears to destroy the "evidence." 2) Kayla and her "best" friend Val are called down to the police station to be questioned about the disappearance of their other "best" friend Antoinette. Kayla's husband doesn't even bother to go with her and stays at home and gets drunks while she's being harassed by the detective. 3) Val is a lawyer but she's not smart enough to say she's not talking without an attorney present. 4) The community calls them incessantly, leaving phone messages on the answer machine with accusations and questions. Do people really do this? 5) Kayla and Jacob - what was that all about? Nantucket Nights is one of those books that makes you think you could write a book and get it published because this one just isn't that great. Well, maybe that's a little harsh, but you get my drift.

Why Did I LikeThis?:
This was definitely a light beach read --- a romance shrouded in a bit of mystery. I read it in just a few hours, enjoyed it while reading it, and found it quite a page-turner. But at the end I wondered why it appealed to me and why I even read it. Thinking about this, I realized that the book was appealing because Hilderbrand pushed a lot of *hot* buttons: interracial relationships, extramarital sex, murder, women's friendship, female bonding, etc. She targeted an audience and reached it - the hallmark of a good marketing plan. Almost every single situation bordered on preposterous....from Antoinette's "disappearance", to the ridiculous way the police acted, to the affair between an 18 and a 40 year old, to Kayla's behavior -- but I sped through it, so what does that say about me? Guess I just needed something light to read at that particular time and this story reeled me in!

Predictable Pretense:
If you like novels full of airy nonsensical drama where the characters are either criminally diadvantaged or suffer from moral quadriplegia, where the plot is fantastically unrealistic, and where the protagonists are utterly unsympathetic, then this is the book for you and you should stop reading right here, fans of Joan Collins. I bought this book with the hope that, from the baseness of the pond scum of which she writes, Ms. Hilderbrand would transform her reader's world into something remotely resembling an effort to create a work having an ounce of artistic merit - at least that's what the book cover led me to believe (She graduated from Johns Hopkins and Iowa's writing program). How this book was rated so highly by other Amazon readers is questionable. Instead, I found that the author's writing style, burdened with overused cliche's and overused storylines, indulged itself in her characters' saccharine-like lives without ever giving any thought as to its cancerous effects on her writing and without giving any credit to her characters, which is a shame. It's clear the author has some writing talent - the vocabulary and syntax is better than your average Harlequinn, but it's equally clear that the author needs to get over the pretensiousness of her character's lives in order to reach something a tad more lasting and impressionable and a bit less predictable. Some might find the scandalous revelations exciting, but I found them predictable and quite boring about forty pages into the book. If the author focused less on trying to write a book that would be mass-produced and more on what her characters were really like 20 years ago, then she would probably find a greater audience. In the end, this book was an utter waste of time and a real insult to the reader's intelligence. If you want sex, drugs, and rock n' roll there are far better places to read about it.

Couldn't Put This One Down:
After having loved Hilderbrand's first book, The Beach Club, I couldn't wait to get my hands on Nantucket Nights. This book did not dissapoint. Despite having fewer characters, fewer pages, and fewer parrallel stories, this book was a far more complex book then her first. Aside from that the two are completely different entities, for which Ms. Hilderbrand should be commended. Too often, authors get burdened by publisher deadlines and churn out formulary stories, but not her. This is an intricately woven story of family, of friendship, and of our perceptions of the truth. It is the story of instincts and judgements, and of identity. Kayla, the story's protagonist, is a complex woman who struggles with insecurity in her marriage, and insecurity with who she is. She identifies herself as a mother, a wife, and a friend until the story unravels and all of that comes into question. This is the story of three unlike women who, for twenty years, get together one night of Labor Day weekend for a ritualistic midnight swim, truth telling and end of Summer celebratory night. Well, on the twentieth anniversary of this night the unspeakable happens and their friendship -- amongst so many other things -- becomes unravelled when one of the women disappears before sharing a dark secret. As Kayla searches for the truth about that secret, she begins to learn things about her friends and her family that she never would have imagined. As the pages turn towards the end, the reader is drawn in and Kayla learns so much about perception versus reality. She learns about herself, her family and who she has to be in order to render the strength to move on. This book is fantastic, and I cannot wait to read more by this talented author. If you want a fast but intelligent and interesting read that delves into the human psyche and relationships, pick up one of her books. You will be captivated.