NANTUCKET SISTERS - Nancy Thayer
Ballantine (Hardcover & eBook)
ISBN-13: 978-0-345-54548-7
June 2014
Contemporary Romance

Nantucket Island, Massachusetts – Present Day

Maggie McIntyre is a native of Nantucket Island, living among the locals in the small cottages near the beach.  Her mother is a seamstress and takes in laundry to make ends meet.  Maggie and her brother Ben love the island.  They're among the poor of Nantucket; Maggie's clothes are always homemade, and she has to make excuses to friends for not going to the movies or out for sodas, as there is never enough money to go around.

In sharp contrast, Emily Porter lives in her parents' summer house on the cliffs overlooking the beaches of Nantucket.  In the winter they will return to their apartment in New York City, closing up the Nantucket mansion until the next summer.

Maggie and Emily meet and became fast friends one summer, and even though Emily has several dresses for every occasion, Maggie makes do with just a few homemade garments.  Emily always meets Maggie at her house; she's never invited Maggie to the mansion on the hill.  And even with all their differences, the girls are closer than sisters, spending nearly every minute of every summer together.  They go to the boathouse they've named Shipwreck House and spend hours there discussing Maggie's novel that she's titled Siren Song .

In the pages of NANTUCKET SISTERS, Maggie's brother Ben is a constant figure in the lives of Maggie and Emily.  The chapters are blocks of time out of the summers the girls spend together.  As time moves forward, Maggie and Emily grow older, plan for college, then each of them goes off into her own romantic relationships, which fatefully becomes entwined in mysterious ways.  Both of them have secrets they keep from one another, secrets that could threaten their friendship and the idyllic peace they feel when they are together on the island.

All the characters are rich and dynamic, adding depth and drama to a story that you will not put down.  Among these are Maggie's mother, Frances, and her step-father, the stout and larger-than-life, Thaddeus Ramsdale. Emily's mother and father move the story along as we get glimpses of each of their lifestyles and prejudices toward the Nantucket island locals.  Maggie has another best friend, a geeky boy named Tyler Madison whom she hangs around with during the times when Emily is at a social function or missing from the island in the winter.  Maggie and Tyler scour the beaches of Nantucket for sea life and rock formations.

NANTUCKET SISTERS is a wondrous novel of love, friendship, and the havoc wreaked as we learn life's lessons and the importance of the true meaning of family.

Diana Risso