28 Summers

I’m still very conflicted over my thoughts regarding Elin Hilderbrand’s latest novel, 28 Summers more than 24 hours after I finished reading it.

It was an easy, pleasant quick read. It was a romance. Perhaps it was a beach read, but I’m not really sure.

The writing in this novel evoked the beach far more than Summerof ’69, which I read earlier this summer. In fact, the beach felt like a character in 28 Summers. As a beach lover, I appreciated that.

Each chapter was a year between 1993 and 2020. She started each chapter with a recap of news highlights from that year. Being a current events junky, I did particularly like that. I especially love what she wrote for 2001. I’m not going to copy the entire thing, but after recollections of 

“A Tuesday morning with a crystalline sky…” she writes, “If there’d been anything else we cared about that year before this happened, it was now debris. It became part of what we lost.”

Now for what I didn’t like. First my small issue. I’m not sure why Hilderbrand thought it was necessary to let us know that Mallory dies at the end of the book right at the very beginning.

My bigger issue was the fact that this was a story about adultery (I hope I’m not laying out a spoiler). The story line revolves around the old movie,"Same Time Next Year." An even bigger issue was that there rarely seemed to be any guilt about the cheating. Won’t go into more detail here, but I found that disheartening.

Wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this beachy novel, but if adultery is not your thing, steer clear.