The Summer Wives - Review

Summer Wives
by Beatriz Williams3
71 pages
Release date 7/10/2018
3 out of 5 stars

According to the publisher, “In the summer of 1951, Miranda Schuyler arrives on elite, secretive Winthrop Island as a schoolgirl from the margins of high society, still reeling from the loss of her father in the Second World War. When her beautiful mother marries Hugh Fisher, whose summer house on Winthrop overlooks the famous lighthouse, Miranda’s catapulted into a heady new world of pedigrees and cocktails, status and swimming pools. Isobel Fisher, Miranda’s new stepsister—all long legs and world-weary bravado, engaged to a wealthy Island scion—is eager to draw Miranda into the arcane customs of Winthrop society.

But beneath the island’s patrician surface, there are really two clans: the summer families with their steadfast ways and quiet obsessions, and the working class of Portuguese fishermen and domestic workers who earn their living on the water and in the laundries of the summer houses. Uneasy among Isobel’s privileged friends, Miranda finds herself drawn to Joseph Vargas, whose father keeps the lighthouse with his mysterious wife. In summer, Joseph helps his father in the lobster boats, but in the autumn he returns to Brown University, where he’s determined to make something of himself. Since childhood, Joseph’s enjoyed an intense, complex friendship with Isobel Fisher, and as the summer winds to its end, Miranda’s caught in a catastrophe that will shatter Winthrop’s hard-won tranquility and banish Miranda from the island for nearly two decades.

Now, in the landmark summer of 1969, Miranda returns at last, as a renowned Shakespearean actress hiding a terrible heartbreak. On its surface, the Island remains the same—determined to keep the outside world from its shores, fiercely loyal to those who belong. But the formerly powerful Fisher family is a shadow of itself, and Joseph Vargas has recently escaped the prison where he was incarcerated for the murder of Miranda’s stepfather eighteen years earlier. What’s more, Miranda herself is no longer a naïve teenager, and she begins a fierce, inexorable quest for justice for the man she once loved . . . even if it means uncovering every last one of the secrets that bind together the families of Winthrop Island. “

The Summer Wives features three different stories and timelines of interwoven characters, with each chapter alternating between the different plots.  The book starts with Miranda as an adult, with alternating chapters telling about her time on Winthrop Island as a teenager with her stepsister Isobel and love interest Joseph, delving even farther into the past to the story of Joseph’s family and their relationship to the other island residents.

For me, it took quite a bit of time to really get involved in the different stories that are being told.  It’s not apparent how the plots are all connected for a pretty significant portion of the book, which I personally found distracting.  It was hard to keep my attention focused because I wasn’t sure of why we were being given the storylines in an alternating fashion rather than chronologically.  Eventually this method does make for an interesting reveal, but until I reached that part of the book, I kept putting it down and not coming back to it for a few days.

I also struggled with how the characters in this book were written.  While it’s obvious who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are, almost everyone was somewhat unlikable to me.  I did care about what happened to all of the characters, but there was no one that I was sad to leave once the book ended.

I did enjoy the setting of the book - reading about wealthy people in a beautiful location is almost universally interesting to me, and Winthrop Island and its’ residents do not disappoint in this aspect.  The author does a great juxtaposition of including the “working class” characters against the back drop of a wealthy vacation town, giving the reader an interesting look at the more subtle dynamics of a resort area that I haven’t really given much thought to before.

Overall, I did enjoy this book and am happy that I kept coming back to it.  If you enjoy historical fiction, you may enjoy The Summer Wives too!