The bonds of family and friendship--however loving and limiting--are recurrent themes in Nancy Thayer novels (Girls of Summer; Surfside Sisters). In Family Reunion, she returns to her beloved Nantucket and delivers a tender, multi-generational saga about the Sunderland family, who have had a beach house on the island for generations.
Eleanor, the widowed matriarch, is disappointed when her best friend makes plans with her husband, leaving Eleanor to fend for herself all summer. When Eleanor's adult children, Cliff and Alicia, who both live in Boston and visit their mother on the island, learn this news, they become determined to convince Eleanor, in her 70s, to sell the multi-level house and move to senior housing. Eleanor resists, knowing that her children, while well intentioned, also have designs on acquiring proceeds from the sale. For Eleanor, however, the house has a value more precious than money--it is her home and holds a lifetime of cherished memories.
Eleanor gets a reprieve from her children's plot when her granddaughter Ariana (Ari)--Alicia's offspring--a recent college graduate who called off her wedding, asks Eleanor if she can spend the summer. The two women--generations apart, yet immensely compatible--both step out in exciting directions, leading to new romantic relationships that ultimately empower them.
Thayer thoroughly understands the nuances of family and the not-always-sincere and altruistic motivations therein. She layers in a host of contemporary complications and subplots that will satisfy readers in search of escapist, yet thought-provoking, domestic fiction. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines