It’s been a very busy year with my new career as a museum director, and I have allowed my hobby of reading and reviewing to fall by the wayside. Going from working a 9-to-5 (or rather 10-to-6) for years to having no set hours has taken its toll on my free time. One might think that would be the perfect work situation, but you have to have focus and boundaries, or you’ll end up working 7 days a week and stressed out. I’m slowing pulling myself out of feeling like I have to be on call 24/7.
As for recent reading interests, I have enjoyed several local books lately, fiction and non. Being thoroughly bored with World War fiction, the 1960’s is an era I’ve been reading over the past year–the Beatles, the Kennedys, the Apollo missions, the cultural changes. Elin Hilderband’s historical fiction debut seems the perfect match my summer reading!
“Welcome to the most tumultuous summer of the twentieth century. It’s 1969, and for the Levin family, the times they are a-changing. Every year the children have looked forward to spending the summer at their grandmother’s historic home in downtown Nantucket. But like so much else in America, nothing is the same: Blair, the oldest sister, is marooned in Boston, pregnant with twins and unable to travel. Middle sister Kirby, caught up in the thrilling vortex of civil rights protests and determined to be independent, takes a summer job on Martha’s Vineyard. Only-son Tiger is an infantry soldier, recently deployed to Vietnam. Thirteen-year-old Jessie suddenly feels like an only child, marooned in the house with her out-of-touch grandmother and her worried mother, each of them hiding a troubling secret. As the summer heats up, Ted Kennedy sinks a car in Chappaquiddick, man flies to the moon, and Jessie and her family experience their own dramatic upheavals along with the rest of the country.
In her first historical novel, rich with the details of an era that shaped both a nation and an island thirty miles out to sea, Elin Hilderbrand once again earns her title as queen of the summer novel.”