Infinite Books

Hollis’s life seems ideal: she has a great husband, a heart surgeon,  a beautiful summer house on Nantucket in addition to her Wellesley’s home, and her humble food blog became so popular during the pandemic that now she has many followers who want to “cook with Hollis.”. Sure, not everything is picture-perfect. Her adult daughter Caroline replies to Hollis’s texts in monosyllables, and her husband Mathew has become distant, attending medical conferences more often and skipping their family’s rituals. Still, Hollis thinks it’s just a phase and nothing that a good summer at Nantucket can’t fix. But then Matthew is killed in one car accident, swerving to avoid a deer, and Hollis’s world falls apart. After a few months, she comes across a great idea:  a weekend with her friends, one woman from every phase of her life. Five women whose only connection is Hollis, the five-star weekend in her summer house, filled with good food (Hollis makes excellent dishes, of course), sunbathing, shopping, dancing, and hopefully, reconnecting.

It’s a risky idea. I remember a birthday party when a host invited her friends, whose only connection was her. It didn’t work. We often tend to compartmentalize our relations: there are friends we meet for coffee, co-workers, and others we know from our book clubs or exercise classes. Hopefully, there are also friends we can count on, perhaps long-term friendships from our formative years. Hollis’s friends are very different: they all bring to Hollis’s home their own problems. And it may be too difficult to share them over a perfect sandwich.

I’ve seen Elin Hilderbrand’s books, but this is the first one I have read. After some research, I discovered that the author has many fans,  and some of them are real devotees who even gather once a year on Nantucket for their own five-star weekend, a simpler version with yoga, readings, and book trivia. It reminded me of the Jane Austen clubs over the country or the Wodehouse Society, although these two are much more developed and organized. The gatherings of Elin Hildebrand’s fans look like fun. As the author said, they are not about her and her books but, ultimately, about women who come, just like “The Five-Star Weekend” is about women and how strong and vulnerable they are: how others and their friendships can make every problem easier.

 Even though I found some aspects far-fetched, like Brooke’s revelation, and it was a bit hard for me to relate to Dru-Ann, I really enjoyed this novel, filled with a feeling of summer, good meals shared with friends, and underlying optimism of getting a second chance in life.

THE FIVE-STAR WEEKEND by Elin Hilderbrand, published by Little, Brown and Company, 2023