Summer Island

March 1, 2001
Second-chance love of a different stripe--between mother and daughter--is the focus of Hannah's (Angel Falls) overheated family drama. More than 10 years ago, Nora Bridge walked out on her husband and two daughters. Now a wildly popular radio talk-show host and syndicated columnist, Nora offers inspirational advice that appeals to listeners' family values. What Nora's fans don't know is that her youngest daughter, Ruby, now 28, hasn't spoken to her mother in years. When a scandal breaks concerning Nora's unsavory past, Ruby, whose stand-up comedy career hasn't taken off the way she hoped it would, is hired to pen a tell-all article. Conveniently for Ruby, Nora is injured in a car accident and needs someone to accompany her to the family's former retreat on Washington's Summer Island. Once mother and daughter begin to get reacquainted, however, trading secrets, learning to see each other as people and healing the wounds of the past, Ruby isn't sure she wants to write the profile after all. Two subplots drive home the same lesson: one featuring Ruby and Dean, the young man Ruby pushed away while she was too busy hating her mother, and another involving Dean and his gay brother, Eric, now dying of cancer--conveniently, Dean and Eric are staying on a neighboring island, trying to get reacquainted. In all cases, Hannah's prescription for saving shaky relationships is the same: talk and forgiveness. The cozy sentimentality may appeal to fans of confessional talk shows--others will want to give Hannah's latest a miss. (Mar.) Forecast: Crown is backing Summer Island with a first printing of 125,000, advertising in major national publications and a teaser excerpt in Ballantine's mass market edition of Angel Falls, due out this month, but it's unlikely that this by-the-numbers offering will expand the author's reader base.

November 15, 2000
From Mystic Lake to Summer Island. Radio talk-show host Nora Bridge has it all--except the daughter she abandoned when she walked out on her marriage years ago. Now Ruby is offered a fortune to write a nasty tell-all, but first she heads for a small island off the coast of Washington to encounter her estranged mom once more.

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2001
When Ruby was 16, her mother, Nora, walked out on her family, and Ruby has never forgiven her. Nora has become a famous national advice guru based in Seattle, and when the press finds out about an affair she had while still married, her career is thrown into turmoil by the scandal. Ruby, an unemployed comedian, has a chance to make some money by writing an article about her now-famous mother, whom she hasn't spoken to in 10 years, and when Nora is injured in a car accident, Ruby breaks her silence and decides to take care of her mostly as an aid to her writing project. They hole up in their old family vacation home on Summer Island off the coast of Seattle and behave like boxers coming out to spar with one another and then retreating to their corners to wait for the second round of confrontations. Ruby starts working on her article as therapy to distract her from dealing with her mother, but as the two women become accustomed to each other, Ruby starts to remember the good times and learns that she didn't really know either of her parents well enough to judge them. Nora opens up and reveals that there were serious problems in her marriage before she left. Ruby also becomes more aware of herself and of all the problems in her life that have been caused by her reaction to her childhood. Hannah has written a wonderful mother/daughter story that highlights the individuality of each strong woman and shines hope on fractured relationships.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)