Summer Island

By Kristin Hannah

Book Overview

Thirty-four year old Ruby Bridge is a not-too-successful comedienne who uses her mother, a nationally-syndicated "moral and spiritual counselor" as the main fodder for her cynical, rather bitter humor. Her mother Nora, long divorced from Ruby's father, is a woman whose past is just about to catch up with her - in the form of blackmail by a former lover. After an accident (an attempted suicide?) Ruby returns to care for her stricken mother - bitterly resenting the fact that once again her mother's life has colonized hers. When she is approached by a publisher to write a biography of her mother, Ruby is desperate for the princely sum offered. Yet her research into her mother's past reveals a woman very different from the one Ruby expected. And what began as "mommy dearest" ends as a love story - not only between mother and daughter, but involving two very different men who play a key role in linking the past to the present.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345478932
• ISBN13: 9780345478931
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 4.3" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

Another great Kristin Hannah novel

Quick read, difficult to put down. Highly recommend if you are a Kristin Hannah fan.

Great story, so well written!

No matter how hard life can be, if you can love, you can conquer anything! If you have always struggled with a relationship with your daughter like I have, this book will be of great interest to you! It taught me how to love all people and not judge because you just never know what they’ve been through.

Another great from Kristin Hannah

Kristin Hannah is one of my go tos for a good read. I wanted a good light summer read. This book wasn’t at all what I expected from the title, but it was so good. It touches on how complicated family relationships can be. This book brought out so many emotions in me and was just a great read.

The truth will always set you free…

I felt a lot of myself in this book. Our pasts are just that…the past. If we can’t work through the hurt, we carry it around with us until the end. This is a story of a broken family that learns what life truly has to offer. Thank you Kristen Hannah for sharing your talent with us all.

Summer Island

delightful story.. Kristin Hannah is a very talented writer and her stories always take place in the NW.

Makes you want to call your mom

I didn't know what to expect with this book. I own all of Kristin Hannah's books and love them all, each for different reasons. This book was very special. I love the mother/daughters relationship. I love how complex the characters were and how there were no real clear-cut good and bad people in the relationships... how sometimes, choices give way to unforeseen consequences.For those who have read Kristin Hannah's other books, you know she often has recurrent characters in her books. Val and Julien (from Home Again and Angel Falls) make a cameo. It is a tear-jerker but not because of the life-altering moments of the book, but there are such quiet, sneak-up-on-you scenes that really touched me. It's the quiet details that really make a book more complex and extraordinary.

This book deserves ten stars!

SUMMER ISLAND is Kristin Hannah's best book. I'm usually a tough audience for this type of "women's fiction" because I don't like feeling that I'm being manipulated into reaching for the Kleenex, but this book didn't manipulate me; it transported me into the minds and emotions of its characters. I found myself swept away to SUMMER ISLAND where a mother and daughter rediscover each other and the selves they thought they'd lost forever. This is a book about relationships, a book about the unbreakable ties that bind families and friends together, and a book about how short and precious this life really is and how very little time we can afford to waste. Not only is Kristin a consummate storyteller, she is also an exquisite writer who is able to use the simplest of words to capture the most complex of emotions. Ruby and Nora Bridge are characters I won't soon forget and SUMMER ISLAND is a book that definitely deserves to be on all the "Best of..." lists for 2001.