These Summer Storms
New York Times bestselling author Sarah MacLean’s first foray into contemporary fiction, with a sharp, sexy novel about a wealthy New England family’s long-overdue reckoning with hidden desires, destructive secrets…and one week that threatens to tear them apart
Alice isn’t like the other Storm siblings. While the rest stayed to battle for their parents’ approval, attention, and untold billions, she left, building her own life beyond the family’s name and influence. Nothing could induce her to come back, except the shocking death of her larger-than-life father. Now back on the family’s private island off the Rhode Island coast, she plans to keep her head down, pay the last of her respects, and leave the minute the funeral is over.
Unfortunately, her father had other plans. The eccentric, manipulative patriarch left his widow and their grown children a final challenge–an inheritance game designed to humiliate, devastate, and unravel the Storm family in ways both petty and life-altering. The rules of the game are clear: stay on the island for one week, complete the tasks, receive the inheritance.
One week on Storm Island is an impossible task for Alice. Every corner of the sprawling old house is bursting dysfunctional chaos: Her older sister’s secret love affair. Her brother’s incessant mansplaining. Her sister-in-law’s unapologetic greed. Her younger sister’s obsession with “vibes”. Her mother’s penchant for stirring up competition between her children. And all under the stern, watchful gaze of Jack Dean, her father’s enigmatic, unfairly good-looking, second-in-command. It will be a miracle if Alice manages to escape the week unscathed.
A story about the transformative power of grief, love, and family, this luscious novel is at once deliciously clever and surprisingly tender, exploring past secrets, present truths, and futures forged in the wake of wild summer storms.
My thoughts:
I’d heard a ton of positive things about this book when it came out, and I was excited to finally pick it up. I’m sad to report that I was pretty underwhelmed by it in the end. And that’s strange for me because a messy family drama with feuding siblings, secrets, and drama that play out against the backdrop of grief is usually right up my alley, but this one just didn’t land for me.
Alice Storm has spent years quietly building a life away from her famous, complicated family. Her parents are obscenely wealthy, her siblings are all still circling the parental approval drain, but Alice is the one who got out and has no intention of reconnecting with any of them. But then her father dies and she’s drawn back to the family’s private island off the coast of Rhode Island. She plans to fly in, get through the funeral, pay her respects, and disappear again before anyone notices. Then her father’s will gets read, and in true fashion, he’s set up one final game for his family. Stay on the island for a week, complete the assigned tasks, and you get your share of the inheritance. Skip out, and you get nothing. More importantly – no one gets anything. If even one person refuses to play, that’s it for everyone. The whole thing is designed to drag every Storm sibling’s worst self into the light. Adding to the mess is Jack Dean, her dad’s second-in-command, who happens to be irritatingly handsome and right in the middle of all of this.
On paper, this should have been the drama-filled messiness that I love. In practice, my biggest issue was that every character felt like a specific stereotype. Each of them is exactly the version of themselves you’d expect from the first time they show up on the page, and they stay that way. Nobody surprised me. Even Alice, who’s set up to be the grounded rebel, and the one you want to root for, brought nothing new or unexpected to the table.
The same was true of the plot. The reveals all felt expected and uninspired. I could see most of them coming from a mile out, and once they arrived, they didn’t really hit any harder. The setup promises a lot of drama. The book just doesn’t quite deliver the payoff to match the promise. Overall, it’s fine and that’s about all I can give it.
I think the romance subplot was the part that bugged me the most. I found that thread cringy and forced, like the book felt obligated to include a romance even though the family dynamics were already plenty to work with. The chemistry didn’t sell me, and the timeline of how things developed felt wedged in. I would have been happier if that whole element had either been cut or given a lot more room to breathe.
There are things to like here. The island setting is well done. The premise of an inheritance game with assigned tasks is fun. I just wanted more from the characters and more from the plot, and I didn’t get either.
I know plenty of people loved this book. Family drama is so subjective, and what felt safe to me will probably feel exciting to someone else. If a familiar setup with familiar archetypes sounds like exactly what you want, you might have a much better time with this than I did.
