Sept 6: Five Star Weekend

Lately my summer commitment has been reading fun books… and pretty much only fun books or mysteries, but generally not too many thrillers.

So my latest read is Five-Star Weekend which I downloaded as an audiobook through Book of the Month.

Will I give it five stars? 😬

Synopsis:

From Goodreads

“After tragedy strikes, Hollis Shaw gathers four friends from different stages in her life to spend an unforgettable weekend on Nantucket.

Hollis Shaw’s life seems picture-perfect. She’s the creator of the popular food blog Hungry with Hollis and is married to Matthew, a dreamy heart surgeon. But after she and Matthew get into a heated argument one snowy morning, he leaves for the airport and is killed in a car accident. The cracks in Hollis’s perfect life—her strained marriage and her complicated relationship with her daughter, Caroline—grow deeper.

So when Hollis hears about something called a “Five-Star Weekend”—one woman organizes a trip for her best friend from each phase of her life: her teenage years, her twenties, her thirties, and midlife—she decides to host her own Five-Star Weekend on Nantucket. But the weekend doesn’t turn out to be a joyful Hallmark movie.

The husband of Hollis’s childhood friend Tatum arranges for Hollis’s first love, Jack Finigan, to spend time with them, stirring up old feelings. Meanwhile, Tatum is forced to play nice with abrasive and elitist Dru-Ann, Hollis’s best friend from UNC Chapel Hill. Dru-Ann’s career as a prominent Chicago sports agent is on the line after her comments about a client’s mental health issues are misconstrued online. Brooke, Hollis’s friend from their thirties, has just discovered that her husband is having an inappropriate relationship with a woman at work. Again! And then there’s Gigi, a stranger to everyone (including Hollis) who reached out to Hollis through her blog. Gigi embodies an unusual grace and, as it happens, has many secrets.

The Five-Star Weekend is a surprising and captivating story about friendship, love, and self-discovery set on Nantucket. It will be a weekend like no other.”

Cute Story

I don’t think enough stories are about 50+ year old women and their lives, so I’m happy to read this one! Unfortunately, I’ve never been to Nantucket! Will need to go and read more Elin Hilderbrand 😊

Overall, I liked it: I loved the friendship between all the ladies and learning about how it changed over the years. There’s a little romance, but not too much, despite being a girly novel. Maybe this is a common characteristic of Elin’s books, but I haven’t read any others.

Each of the women has their own drama and relationships that make them interesting, and they’re self-aware of their flaws which makes sense since they’re in their 50s… I loved all the characters really.

I felt like the Gigi drama kept dragging out. On one hand, I knew we wouldn’t have a resolution until the end of the book, but I also felt like I didn’t get enough of Gigi’s character when we learned so much about the others.