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Summary
Summary
Friendship takes center stage in New York Times bestselling author Nancy Thayer's captivating, emotionally charged novel featuring all the tenderness and wit, drama and romance, that listeners have come to expect from this insightful, much-loved writer.
When they meet as girls on a beach in Nantucket, Maggie McIntyre and Emily Porter become fast friends--though Emily's well-heeled mother would prefer that she associate with the upscale daughters of bankers and statesmen rather than the child of a local seamstress. But the two lively, imaginative girls nevertheless spend many golden summers together building castles in the sand, creating magical worlds of their own, and forging grand plans for their future.
Even as Emily falls for Maggie's brother, Ben, and the young women's paths diverge, the duo remain close friends. Then the unthinkable happens: a lifelong friendship is pushed to its breaking point with the appearance of the handsome, charismatic, charming, and incredibly sexy Wall Street trader Cameron Chadwick--upending both of their lives.
Struggling with the difficult choices they have made and the secrets they have kept, Maggie and Emily find the road to love and fulfillment is full of bumps and twists, as well as entirely unexpected and quite wonderful turns of the heart. They also learn that while true love may be rare, a true friendship is rarer still.
Author Notes
Author Nancy Thayer was born in Emporia, Kansas on December 14, 1943. She attended the University of Wichita and received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in English literature. She taught freshmen English at various colleges and wrote fiction during her free time. Some of her short stories were accepted by various college literary reviews. Her first novel Stepping was published in 1980 and was adapted into a BBC radio series. Since then, she has written numerous books including Moon Shell Beach, The Hot Flash Club, The Hot Flash Club Strikes Again, Hot Flash Holidays, The Hot Flash Club Chills Out, Between Husbands and Friends, The Island House and Beachcombers.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Booklist Review
Emily Porter can't wait to get to her family's vacation home on Nantucket because that means another summer of adventuring and imagination with her best friend, Maggie McIntyre. At 11, Emily is too naive to understand why Maggie is never invited to her house or why Emily's mother looks down on Maggie's mother, a divorced seamstress. As they get older, and the class divisions deepen, Maggie and Emily remain Nantucket sisters even when Emily falls in love with Maggie's older brother, Ben. But when they finish college, they finally drift apart as they try to settle into adulthood. Then Emily meets the dashing Cameron Chadwick, who is old-money New York, just like her. At the same time, Maggie has a one-night stand. The two women go through their pregnancies separately, and it is not until tragedy strikes that they are brought back together again. Thayer obviously knows her Nantucket, and the strong sense of place makes this the perfect escapist book for the summer, particularly for fans of Elin Hilderbrand.--Maguire, Susan Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Thayer (Island Girls, 2013, etc.) returns to the sunny shores of Nantucket, where two friends from different backgrounds share childhood memories and the same man.Thayer describes the idyllic shores of Nantucket with cheerful prose: the sun, fat and buttery as one a child would draw in school, shines on a sea that winks blue and turquoise on the beaches where Emily and Maggie meet every summer to play. Their love for the island may be all the two girls have in common. Emilys mother, a wealthy New Yorker, wants nothing to do with the islandersincluding Maggie, whose mother is a poor seamstress. Though Emilys mother disappears too often to cause any real friction between the girls, Emily and Maggie realistically grow apart as they go to college, start careers and meet boys. Emilys romance with Maggies brother, Ben, seems doomed when he asks her to downgrade her lifestyle to match his just as rich Cameron Chadwick asks her out on a date. When Emily finds out shes pregnant, shes not sure if the baby belongs to Cameron or Ben, but she rolls the dice and tells Cameron its his after Ben refuses to answer his phone. Its debatable whether Emily is acting in the best interest of her child or avoiding responsibility, but her internal struggle is compelling as she tries to keep her unhappy marriage together. Emily might have made a different choice had she known that Cameron impregnated Maggie after a one-night stand. In a maddening twist, Maggie decides not to tell Emily that Cameron fathered her child. We'll never know if Emilywould be enraged or pleased that her daughter and Maggies might be half sisters. Still, their reunion is sweet when an unexpected tragedy brings Emily back to the island.Money corrupts, but love prevails, making it easy to overlook the flaws in this friendship. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Emily Porter and Maggie McIntyre became fast friends when they met as children on the island of Nantucket, where Emily's family vacationed every summer. Maggie's family is from the island, with her single mother being the local seamstress, and she and her brother, Ben, both working to keep the family afloat financially. Emily comes from wealth and as a result their friendship is frowned on by the Porter family. When Emily falls for Ben, Maggie couldn't be happier. Now they can finally be real sisters, not just "Nantucket sisters," as they dubbed themselves as youngsters. But things begin to unravel between the girls as Emily and Ben's relationship stalls when Emily's pursuit of an advanced degree and Ben's pride and lack of money become roadblocks. The women's friendship is once again put to the test with the introduction of handsome Wall Street trader Cameron Chadwick. They are forced to make decisions, to keep secrets, and finally to discover the truth needed to make a friendship last. Verdict Thayer keeps readers on the edge of their seats with her dramatic story spanning the girls' childhood to adulthood. This wonderful beach read packs a punch.-Erin A. Holt, Williamson Cty. P.L., Franklin, TN (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One It's like a morning in heaven. From a blue sky, the sun, fat and buttery as one a child would draw in school, shines down on a sapphire ocean. Eleven-year-old Emily Porter stands at the edge of a cliff high above the beach, her blond hair rippled by a light breeze. The edge of the cliff is an abrupt, jagged border, into which a small landing is built, with railings around it so you can lean against it, looking out at the sea. Before her, weathered wooden steps cut back and forth down the steep bluff to the beach. Behind her lies the grassy lawn and their large gray summer house, so different from their apartment on East Eighty-sixth in New York City. Last night, as the Porters flew away from Manhattan, Emily looked down on the familiar fantastic panorama of sparkling lights, urging the plane onward with her excitement, with her longing to see the darkness and then, in the distance, the flash and flare of the lighthouse beacons. Nantucket begins today. Today, while her father plays golf and her beautiful mother, Cara, organizes the house, Emily is free to do as she pleases. And what she's waited for all winter is to run down the street into the small village of 'Sconset and along the narrow path to the cottages in Codfish Park, where she'll knock on Maggie's door. First, she waves back at the ocean. Next, she turns and runs, half skipping, waving her arms, singing. She exults in the soft grass under her feet instead of hard sidewalk, salt air in her lungs instead of soot, the laughter of gulls instead of the blare of car horns, and the sweet perfume of new dawn roses. She flies along past the old-town water pump, past the Sconset Market, past the post office, past Claudette's Box Lunches. Down the steep cobblestoned hill to Codfish Park. Here, the houses used to be shacks where fishermen spread their nets to dry, so the roofs are low and the walls are ramshackle. Maggie's house is a crooked, funny little place, but roses curl over the roof, morning glories climb up a trellis, and pansy faces smile from window boxes. Before she can knock, the door flies open. "Emily!" Maggie's hair's been cut to an elf's cap and she's taller than Emily now, and she has more freckles over her nose and cheeks. Behind Maggie stands Maggie's mother, Frances, wearing a red sundress with an apron over it. Emily's never seen anyone but caterers and cooks wear an apron. It has lots of pockets. It makes Maggie's mother look like someone from a book. "You're here!" Maggie squeals. "Welcome back, Emily." Frances smiles. "Come in. I've made gingerbread." The fragrant scent of ginger and sugar wafts out enticingly from the house, which is, Emily admits privately to her own secret self, the strangest place Emily's ever seen. The living room's in the kitchen, the sofa, armchairs, television set, and coffee table, all covered with books and games, are just on the other side of the round table from the sink and appliances. In the dining room, a sewing machine stands on a long table, and piles of fabric bloom from every surface in a crazy hodgepodge. Frances is divorced and makes her living as a seamstress, which is why Emily's parents aren't crazy about her friendship with Maggie, who is only a poor island girl. But Maggie and Emily have been best friends since they met on the beach when they were five years old. With Maggie, Emily is her true self. Maggie understands Emily in a way her parents never can. Now that the girls are growing up, Emily senses change in the air--but not yet. Not yet. There is still this summer ahead. And summer lasts forever. "I'd love some gingerbread, thank you, Mrs. McIntyre," Emily says politely. "Oh, holy moly, call her Frances." Maggie tugs on Emily's hand and pulls her into the house. Maggie acts blasé and bossy around Emily, but the truth is she's always kind of astounded at the friendship she and Emily have created. Emily Porter is rich, the big fat New York/Nantucket rich. In comparison, Maggie's family is just plain poor. The McIntyres live on Nantucket year-round but are considered off-islanders, "wash-ashores," because they weren't born on the island. They came from Boston, where Frances grew up and met Billy McIntyre and married and had two children with him. Soon after, they divorced, and he disappeared from their lives. When Maggie was a year old, Frances moved them all to the island, because she'd heard the island needed a good seamstress. She's made a decent living for them--some women call Frances "a treasure." Still, it's hard. It isn't that kids make fun of Maggie at school. Lots of kids don't have fathers, or have fathers who live in different houses or states. It's a personal thing. The sight on a television show, even a television ad, of a little girl running to greet her father when he returns from work at the end of the day, or a bride in her white wedding gown being twirled on the dance floor by her beaming, loving father, can make a sadness stab through her all the way down into her stomach. Plus, her life is so cramped by their lack of money. When a friend asks her to go to a movie during summer at the Dreamland Theater, Maggie always says no, thanks. She can't ask her mom for the money. In the winter, when friends take a plane off island to Hyannis, where they stay in a motel and swim in the heated pools and see movies on huge screens and shop at the mall, they ask Maggie along, but she never can go. She hates the things her mom makes for her out of leftover material saved from dresses she's sewn for grown women. Frances always tries to make the clothes look like those bought in stores, but they aren't bought in stores and Maggie and everyone else knows it. Frances never makes Maggie's brother, Ben, wear homemade stuff. Ben always gets store-bought clothes--and nice ones, ones that all the other guys wear. Their mom knows Ben would walk stark naked into the school before he'd wear a single shirt stitched up by his mother. Ben's two years older than Maggie, and bright, perhaps brilliant--that's what his teachers say. Everything about him's excessive, his tangle of curly black hair, the thick dark lashes, his deep blue eyes, his energy, his temperament. During good weather, he's outside, his legs furiously pumping the pedals of his bike as he tears through the streets of 'Sconset, or scaling a tree like a monkey, hiding in the highest branches, tossing bits of bark on the heads of puzzled pedestrians. He's a genius at sports and never notices when he skids the skin of both knees and elbows into tatters, as long as he makes first base or tackles his opponent. During bad weather, Ben becomes the torment of Maggie's life. When the wind howls against the windows, she'll be curled up with a book, assuming he is, too, for he does like to read--then she'll discover that while he was so quiet, he'd been removing her dolls' eyeballs in an unsuccessful attempt to give all the dolls one blue eye and one brown. One rainy summer day, he scraped the flakes of his sunburned skin into her hairbrush. Another time he put glue between the pages of her treasured books. From day to day and often minute to minute, Maggie never knows whether she loves or hates Ben more. Emily says she'd give anything for a brother or sister. Maggie tells her she can have Ben anytime. Emily is on the island only for three months in the summer, so Maggie doesn't understand why, during the school year, she misses Emily so much. It's not like she doesn't have friends. She has lots of friends. Alisha is fun, but she's pure jock. Alisha's perfect day is going to the beach, running into the water, shrieking and jumping until a wave knocks her down. She comes up laughing, knees scratched from the sand, and runs back into the waves, over and over again. If Maggie suggests a game of make-believe, Alisha looks at her like bugs are coming out her ears. Delphine loves horses. Her parents have a farm. They sell veggies and plants in the summer and Christmas trees in the winter. When Maggie goes to Delphine's house, she spends all day on horseback, or helps Delphine curry the horses or muck out the stalls. Delphine doesn't like to come to Maggie's house--no horses there. Kerrie reads and sometimes plays pretend, but Kerrie has an entrepreneurial mind. She started a summer newspaper for children that she writes, illustrates, and sells from a little newsstand she built out of crates and set up on the corner of Orange and Main. When she isn't selling her newspaper, she sells lemonade and cookies she baked herself. Then there's Tyler Madison. He would be Maggie's best friend except he's a boy. Tyler will play pretend with her if no one else is around. He loves the island as much as Maggie does, perhaps even more, and she can often find him on the moors, painstakingly drawing in his own guide to landmarks, like the unusual boulders the glaciers left thousands of years ago. Using an ordinary scrapbook, Tyler is creating a fantastical volume of detailed maps, showing the names and locations of each salient feature. The cover is carefully pasted with calligraphed words: Official Register of Secrets. Inside, the first page is the Table of Contents. Next, Tyler has entered page after page of carefully sketched or photographed, imagined and described boulders and their locations: Ocean Goddess. Island God. Pond Princesses. Lord and Lady Boulders. Twenty-seven different elf communities. Twelve separate Fellowship of Bushes and the Maraud Squad of poison ivy, scrub oak, bayberry. It's so thoroughly detailed it seems as real as a chart of the stars. Maggie thinks the map is awesome and she adores Tyler, but Ben calls Tyler geekasaurus and four-eyes. It's too bad, but understandable. Pale, underweight, uncoordinated, too clumsy to do sports, Tyler's ostracized by most kids. Maggie suspects she's Tyler's best friend. Maybe she's his only friend. Sometimes Maggie thinks that books are her best friend, her truest, most reliable friend. The fathomless, most treasured part of her own private self is her connection with books. She's happy when she's reading, and library books don't cost Frances a thing. Maybe that's why she and Emily are so close. Emily reads as much as Maggie does. Like Maggie, Emily talks about the characters as if they were real people and she can enter a pretend world like a fish slipping into water. When Maggie met Emily, it was as if a gate opened in Maggie's life. Like a path curved into the future. Maggie began to believe having an imagination was a good thing, that somehow, even if she couldn't see it now, she could believe she had someplace to go, and knew with a wonderful sense of relief that she would have companions along the way. Emily is the person who seems most like Maggie, who gets Maggie. Maggie's not an idiot. She knows Emily is rich while she is poor. Maggie knows rich and poor don't mix. On the other hand, her favorite stories tell her they can. Excerpted from Nantucket Sisters: A Novel by Nancy Thayer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.