Product Description

The ties between women can run as deep as the ocean-but so can the secrets. For 20 years, Kayla, Antoinette and Val have performed their own special summer ritual. Once a year, the old friends put aside their daily, separate lives to drink champagne, swap stories and swim naked under the Nantucket stars. But on one of those bonding nights, one of their trio swims out from the shore and doesn't return. After the surviving friends emerge from their grief, they realize that the repercussions of their loss go far beyond their little circle, and they begin to uncover layers of secrets-and their connections to each other-that were never revealed on the beach. What has made their friendship strong now has the power to destroy-their marriages, families, even themselves.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #910838 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Elin Hilderbrand's Nantucket Nights (after The Beach Club) digs into the private lives of three middle-aged women Kayla, Val and Antoinette. For 20 years, they have made annual midnight excursions to the beach to drink champagne, skinny-dip and swap confidences, until one night Antoinette disappears into the surf and doesn't return. Juicy revelations wash up like broken seashells Antoinette had a daughter 20 years ago and a second love-child was on the way and that's just the beginning. Things get more twisted at every turn, with enough lies and betrayals to fuel a whole season of soap operas. It takes a little while for things to get going, but once they do, readers will be hooked. Regional author tour.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Kayla, Antoinette, and Val are a trio whose unlikely friendship was formed 20 years ago when they each rented a room in the same house. Val and Kayla were fast friends, but, despite Kayla's persistence, Antoinette kept her distance--until one night when her desire for a midnight swim inaugurated an annual ritual and cemented their bond. On a remote point on the island of Nantucket, the three women spend one night each Labor Day weekend drinking champagne, eating lobster, skinny-dipping, and baring their souls. One of the secrets revealed during their twentieth get-together launches a chain of events that changes them all forever. Antoinette swims out to sea and never returns, and as they search for her, wondering if she is alive, a complex web of deceptions (both intentional and unintended) begins to unravel. Though the characters' thoughts and actions seem at times a bit unrealistic, the novel is fast paced and suspenseful enough to keep readers interested. A likely candidate for summer-vacation reading. Beth Warrell
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Customer Reviews

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.

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.