Title: The Five-Star Weekend
Author: Elin Hilderbrand
Genre: Contemporary
ISBN: 978-0316258777
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication Date: 2023
Publisher Description: Hollis Shaw’s life seems picture-perfect. She’s the creator of the popular food blog Hungry with Hollis and is married to Matthew, a dreamy heart surgeon. But after she and Matthew get into a heated argument one snowy morning, he leaves for the airport and is killed in a car accident. The cracks in Hollis’s perfect life—her strained marriage and her complicated relationship with her daughter, Caroline—grow deeper.
So when Hollis hears about something called a “Five-Star Weekend”—one woman organizes a trip for her best friend from each phase of her life: her teenage years, her twenties, her thirties, and midlife—she decides to host her own Five-Star Weekend on Nantucket. But the weekend doesn’t turn out to be a joyful Hallmark movie.
The husband of Hollis’s childhood friend Tatum arranges for Hollis’s first love, Jack Finigan, to spend time with them, stirring up old feelings. Meanwhile, Tatum is forced to play nice with abrasive and elitist Dru-Ann, Hollis’s best friend from UNC Chapel Hill. Dru-Ann’s career as a prominent Chicago sports agent is on the line after her comments about a client’s mental health issues are misconstrued online. Brooke, Hollis’s friend from their thirties, has just discovered that her husband is having an inappropriate relationship with a woman at work. Again! And then there’s Gigi, a stranger to everyone (including Hollis) who reached out to Hollis through her blog. Gigi embodies an unusual grace and, as it happens, has many secrets.
Literary Atelier Review: Each summer I pack away my classics and literary fiction and treat myself to an Elin Hilderbrand summer beach read. Her breezy, gossipy, fun novels are always the perfect accompaniment to our summer holidays, matching the sunny climes of Provence, Bilbao, Athens, or wherever we go next. The Five-Star Weekend kept me in happy company in the summer of 2024 and delighted me immensely as we flew to the land of the Acropolis and back.
Though the beach read is sometimes unfairly maligned (sexism, snobbery) Elin Hilderbrand is the undisputed master of this genre. Until her recently announced retirement she had published a novel each year, just in time for the summer to be read at the airport, on the beach or back at home. She is so skilled at painting the setting of her stories that one can't help but feel they are also strolling along the boardwalk in Nantucket. That is just half the fun. The other skill is in creating intriguing plot lines which are engaging without being too stressful or taxing (this is a holiday book after all) and keep me wanting to come back year upon year to read about the next goings on in Nantucket.
Last year Hilderbrand's novel The Perfect Couple, which happens to be the first novel of hers I read back in around 2017/2018 was made into a glossy Netflix dramatisation staring Nicole Kidman. No doubt this will lead to many more people discovering the happy world of Elin Hilderbrand novels. It is such a fun place to be and I certainly look forward to my vacation there each summer.