Family Reunion

A Novel

By: Nancy Thayer

Narrated by: Tanya Eby, Whitney Dykhouse

Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's Summary

A longtime Nantucket resident is trying to make the best of a lonely summer. Her spirited granddaughter is learning what she wants out of life. Unforgettable surprises await them both in this magical, multigenerational novel from New York Times bestselling author Nancy Thayer.

“Readers come to Nancy Thayer novels for the idyllic Nantucket beaches and lifestyle, but they stay for the characters.” --New York Times bestselling author Mary Alice Monroe

Eleanor Sunderland loves living on Nantucket, in a gorgeous cliffside home that has been in her family for decades. Yet this year she can’t help but feel a bit isolated, even as the island begins to come alive with summer tourists and travelers. Her best friend has skipped town on a last-minute cruise, leaving Eleanor feeling lonely and nostalgic about her family’s weekend trips to the island, made less frequently in the years since her husband’s passing. Now, her money-driven children contact her mostly to complain and to beg her to sell her beloved home for a steep payout. Hoping to kick the season off on a good note, Eleanor decides her seventieth birthday may be the perfect occasion for a much-needed reunion. 

Fresh off the heels of her college graduation, Eleanor’s dear granddaughter, Ari, has just ended an engagement that felt less like true love and more like a chore. She longs for a change of scenery and to venture far from her parents’ snobbish expectations. Taking advantage of her newfound freedom, she heads to Nantucket to clear her head before graduate school, moving in with her grandmother and taking a job at the local beach camp. As she watches Eleanor begin to form a bond with an old acquaintance, Ari herself becomes completely smitten with a friend’s charming older brother. But just as grandmother and granddaughter fall into a carefree routine, a few shocking discoveries throw them off course, and their ideas of the future seem suddenly uncertain. 

Eleanor and Ari make exciting connections, old and new, over the course of an unpredictable, life-changing few months, and learn to lean on each other through every new challenge they face in life and love, in this tale filled with Nancy Thayer’s signature Nantucket magic.

©2021 by Nancy Thayer. (P)2021 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Great story, terrible narrator!

The story was great but the narrator sounds like a computer! It made the story hard to listen to and follow. She has weird pauses and doesn’t finished sentences to the periods. It’s sound like she ends at the end of a line verses sentence.

Narrator detracted from story.

Something was just off on narrator’s voice/tone. Seemed somehow bored. Gram was 70, yet voice portrayed as about 90.

Love the author.

No meat to this book

I enjoy reading Nancy Thayer books, but this one has no meat to it.
I did not like the voices of the narration either.

The book was disappointing.

The narration and the character Alicia were annoying. It was difficult to finish the book.

Just a nice easy delightful read

It was nice to just get away from all the turmoil in the news and tune out to fun happy ending book. I though the narration was excellent and i could picture myself at many of the landmarks because the description was perfect.

best nancy thayer book since A Nantucket wedding

thayer last few books were a DNF for me, so this one was great. I needed to rinse my palat of some of the millennial writing that was praised as great, when it was just bad. if you haven't read Thayer before, her best book and series is the The Hot Flash Club series. I listen to that series again every 3 years or so

Good Story with Annoying Narration

Overall the story was good (if not predictable). The voice actor for Eleanor was not so good. I felt like she was just “reading” and not putting any acting into the characters, and if she did, it was caricature like and over done; not pleasant at all.

fun but totally unrealistic

With so much unnecessary detail, like Eleanor putting Sweet and Low in her coffee, I'm surprised that so much was left out that is a part of real life. I can understand how Eleanor enjoys living alone at this point in her life but this book makes it look so much easier than it really is. Even those who are well off need to pay bills, open mail, do their laundry, clean their house or at least hire someone to do it. None of these things are mentioned making it look like living alone is just sitting around reading books and watching TV. Maybe it's just me but I think some of these real life details would have made this more interesting.

A Hard Book to Like

It’s hard to like a book when one of the characters is so unlikeable. Such was the case of Alicia, the self-centered, money-loving, status-seeking mother of Ari, one of the two narrators of the book. I mean, what kind of heartless person blames her mother when her husband has an affair? There were so many things about this book that irritated me but I don’t want to give too much away. The narration was good, though.

Fun and unexpected twists.

Really enjoyed the characters in this book. Didn't predict some of these twists and liked the storyline