A Hundred Summers

Summary (from the publisher): Memorial Day, 1938: Lily Dane has returned to Seaview, Rhode Island, where her family has summered for generations. It’s an escape not only from New York’s social scene but from a heartbreak that still haunts her. Here, among the seaside community that has embraced her since childhood, she finds comfort in the familiar rituals of summer.

But this summer is different. Budgie and Nick Greenwald—Lily’s former best friend and former fiancé—have arrived, too, and Seaview’s elite are abuzz. Under Budgie’s glamorous influence, Lily is seduced into a complicated web of renewed friendship and dangerous longing.

As a cataclysmic hurricane churns north through the Atlantic, and uneasy secrets slowly reveal themselves, Lily and Nick must confront an emotional storm that will change their worlds forever…

Review: I won a copy of this novel as a giveaway on Goodreads. 

Told in alternating chapters that move between 1931 and 1938, this novel follows the life of Lily Dane. In 1931, Lily is in college. Dragged to a Dartmouth football game with her lifelong friend Budgie, Lily winds up meeting the star of the team and quickly falls in love. Yet in 1938, we see that years later, Lily still lives with her parents, spending the summer as usual at her family's summer home in Seaview, Rhode Island and taking care of her much younger sister, Kiki. Meanwhile, the town is abuzz because Lily's friend Budgie has returned to Seaview, along with her new husband, Nick Greenwald. Slowly, the reader learns exactly what happened between Lily, Budgie, and Nick all those years ago and see how this unlikely love triangle will resolve itself in 1938. 

The alternating passages in this novel did a great job of building tension and made this a fast-paced read. While some novels with this structure drag because one plot line isn't nearly as interesting, this novel was brilliant in that both the 1931 and the 1938 plot lines were suspenseful and I found myself anxious to see what would happen to Lily in both story lines. 

This setting of this novel, both within New York City and Seaview, but also within the greater historical context, tremendously influence the characters. Lily's world is heavily shaped by Prohibition, World War II, and the great hurricane of 1938. Furthermore, Lily and Nick's relationship is complicated by the fact that Nick is Jewish at a time when Jews were still deemed of lower social status. In many ways, Nick and Lily are victims of the times in which they live and the author did an excellent job of recreating the world of New England in the 1930s. 

One aspect of this novel that bothered me was the shadowy figure of Lily's mother. Although she plays a prominent role in the plot development and the relationship between Nick and Lily, she's almost always only seen from a distance or remains absent entirely. "I recognized my mother's tall plump figure, her white dress and strawy hat" (199). An almost identical scene occurred earlier in 1931 when Lily recognizes her mother from afar at a party; "She wears a large white mask covered with white feathers and a little diamond cluster at each tip, and her dress is long and white" (173). Only seen from a distance, Lily's mother seems like a shadowy presence on the very outskirts of the story rather than a fully realized character. 

This novel was the first time I've read anything, fictional or otherwise, about the great storm of 1938. In a time before the advancement of meteorology, it hit without warning, "killing over seven hundred people and felling over two billion trees" (379). Although I found the novel's description of the storm - with characters floating to safety from their attics - somewhat implausible, apparently the author based the depiction of the storm on actual survivors' accounts. Likewise, I found the ending of this almost too tidy and good to be true, but because I found Lily such a likable character who had endured so much bad luck, I was happy to see things go her way. 

Stars: 4