Summer Island

 

Summer Island by Kristin Hannah

This was my second audiobook, and it kept me company during a long drive from South Carolina to Florida and back. I’m really starting to enjoy this format; there’s something comforting about having a story unfold through your speakers while the miles roll by.

I’ve read several of Kristin Hannah’s novels, and she’s known for delivering emotionally charged, powerful stories. However, Summer Island felt slower for me. Maybe it was the audio format…or maybe it’s just hard to follow the brilliance of The Nightingale, The Great Alone, The Women, and The Four Winds. Those are tough acts to follow. I hadn’t realized Hannah had such a deep catalog of earlier works until I stumbled across this one. Honestly, I chose it on a whim…10 hours of listening time felt like a good travel companion.

In a nutshell, Summer Island is about a family coming to terms with painful secrets, forgiveness, and the rebuilding of relationships. The story centers on Ruby Bridge, a struggling stand-up comedian whose estranged mother, Nora, a famous self-help guru, becomes the subject of a public scandal. Ruby has long felt abandoned by her mother, but when Nora falls seriously ill, Ruby returns to her childhood home on Summer Island, off the coast of Washington. There, amid the rugged beauty of Puget Sound, Ruby is forced to confront her past, reconnect with her first love, and ultimately, face herself.

For me, the story felt somewhat predictable…dare I say, almost like a Hallmark or Lifetime movie. Not in a light, romcom way, but in that familiar, emotional arc you can see coming. There are genuine moments of heartache and reflection, but the resolution seemed too tidy. How does a lifetime of pain and resentment resolve itself in a single week on an island? I suppose that’s part of the fiction…the hope that reconciliation and healing can happen swiftly when the heart is finally ready.

That said, Hannah’s sense of place pulled me in. The descriptions of the Pacific Northwest made me want to visit Puget Sound, Seattle, the mist over the water, sunsets from the dock. Even if the emotional journey felt familiar, the setting itself offered a kind of escapism that made the miles pass easily.

One line that lingered with me was this:

“I’d always believed that the truth of a person was easily spotted, a line drawn in dark ink on white paper. Now, I wonder. Maybe the truth of who we are lies hidden in all those shadows of gray that everyone talks about.”

This quote captures one of the deeper themes of Summer Island: the complexity of truth and the fluidity of human nature. We like to think of people…especially family…as either good or bad, right or wrong. But life rarely fits into those neat lines. The “shadows of gray” are where empathy, forgiveness, and understanding live. Ruby’s journey isn’t just about forgiving her mother; it’s about realizing that truth, and love…often exist in contradiction. We can be both hurt and healing, both angry and compassionate.

Ultimately, Summer Island left me thinking about the power of forgiveness…not just forgiving others but also forgiving oneself. Healing is rarely linear. It’s a process of acknowledging the past, then choosing to release its grip. Sometimes, that choice is the hardest part of all.