THESE SUMMER STORMS, by Sarah MacLean
In her memoir, “Small Fry,” Lisa Brennan-Jobs writes about one of her earliest meetings with her father, the Apple founder Steve Jobs. She was 3. “I’m your father,” he told her. “I’m one of the most important people you will ever know.”
The aftershocks of fathers — particularly ones as seismic as Jobs — rumble through Sarah MacLean’s new novel: a gripping inheritance drama, wrapped around a swoony summer romance, that offers a nuanced portrait of a family grappling with secrets, privilege and grief.
MacLean has spent the last 15 years honing her skills as a best-selling author of historical romance. Many of her trademarks are on display here: a determined, bighearted heroine; a tall, gruff and handsome love interest; the perfectly calibrated doses of laugh-out-loud banter and piping-hot intimacy that build to a deliciously satisfying finish.
“These Summer Storms” is her first contemporary novel. And what a joy it is to see how, as she shucks off the corsets and cravats, she uses her new breathing room to full advantage. The upper-crust New England world of this book is as well imagined as any of her Regency romances, and she fills it with even more complex characters, plot twists and intrigue — weaving it together with propulsive finesse. It’s like discovering the lead guitarist of your favorite band is also a concert pianist.
We meet our heroine, Alice, on the day her father, Franklin Storm — a daredevil tech billionaire — dies in a gliding accident. Alice has been estranged from her family for five years, but she is heading (defiantly via Amtrak, not the family helicopter) to their private island off the coast of Rhode Island to mourn.
Alice is a raw nerve, riding the waves of the complicated grief that comes after losing someone you weren’t ready to forgive — which is further compounded by having to share that grief with the world. When she finds herself disembarking alongside a handsome stranger, he seems like the perfect way to fill the chasm of hurt, at least temporarily, and to put off facing her family for a night.
That family has assembled at the Gothically named Storm Manor. There’s Elisabeth, Franklin’s wife of more than 40 years — the kind of perfectly pressed Boston Brahmin blonde to whom “admitting to love would’ve felt as exposing … as attending a New York Public Library gala in the nude.” Greta, the eldest daughter, is her tightly wound acolyte, 40 years old and desperate for her mother’s approval. Sam, the only son, is a company man and feckless father of two in the mode of Kendall “I’m the eldest boy” Roy. After Alice, Emily rounds out the sibling quartet; the openhearted baby of the family, she runs a crystal shop and keeps trying to make everyone meditate.
Anyone with siblings will recognize the Storms. Even after years of estrangement, they speak a private language honed through decades of inside jokes, mundane rituals and shared parental trauma. The four of them use and abuse one another with brutal precision (at one point someone gets locked in a vault), but there are also moments of tender intimacy — a shared look across the kitchen island as their mother spins out, a fight diffused with “the kind of non-apology only sisters were allowed to get away with.” It’s a love as complicated as it is undeniable.
And then there’s Jack, Alice’s one-night stand, who turns out to be her father’s right-hand man. He arrives at the house with a surprise for the Storms: Franklin left letters with tasks for his wife and children to complete within the next week, lest they forfeit their inheritance. “None of them,” Alice realizes, “would be able to easily escape their father’s ghost — new to the job and already exceptionally good at haunting.”
Alice doesn’t get a letter. But she does have a task: She’s not allowed to leave the island until the game is complete. And the person tasked with keeping her there is, of course, Jack. If you’ve read MacLean’s romance novels, you know his type — barely leashed passion straining against a constantly furrowed brow, incredibly sexy, completely irresistible.
Everyone comes to the island with secrets, and over the course of the week they churn like a nor’easter. At the eye of the storm is Franklin, a black hole exerting a gravitational pull even in his absence. Like all fathers, he is complicated: devoted and manipulative, playful and unyielding. Larger than life and, unfathomably to those who loved him, dead.
MacLean masterfully conducts it all, keeping the Storms and the reader on their toes until the final page. It is a delight to watch, and even better if you can do it from an Adirondack chair somewhere breezy with a lobster roll and a Del’s lemonade, or an Elisabeth-style gin and tonic: “90 percent gin, tonic for propriety, lemon twist.”
THESE SUMMER STORMS | By Sarah MacLean | Ballantine | 400 pp. | $30
Jennifer Harlan is an editor at the New York Times Book Review.
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