Tuesday, May 17, 2022

"Summer Love"

Nancy Thayer's many novels include Summer House, The Hot Flash Club, Beachcombers, Island Girls, The Guest Cottage, The Island House, and Secrets in Summer.

Her books concern the mysteries and romance of families and relationships: marriage and friendships, divorce and love, custody and step parenting, family secrets and private self-affirmation, the quest for independence and the normal human hunger for personal connections.

Thayer applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Summer Love, and reported the following:
On Page 69 of Summer Love, four friends are at a beach party at night on Nantucket Island, drinking beer, dancing to loud music, having fun after a week of hard work. Sheila gets harassed by a drunken guy, and Nick, handsome and way out of Sheila’s league, comes to rescue her.

Sheila thinks: She never could understand why Nick rescued her. She knew he wasn’t romantically interested in her, but at least they were becoming friends, and she’d never really had a man friend before.

This test works almost perfectly. In Summer Love, four people in their twenties come to Nantucket to work for the summer. They live in the same basement dorm, get different jobs, and come from very different backgrounds. But over the summer, they become friends. Their lives change, sometimes dramatically, sometimes subtly. The test page could lead to a flashback in time, to the beginning of the book where the four first meet each other and awkwardly realize these are the people they’ll share the summer with.

This summer is a journey, and Sheila, Nick, Ariel, and Wyatt find their lives transformed in ways they couldn’t have imagined.
Learn more about the book and author at Nancy Thayer's website.

The Page 69 Test: Summer House.

The Page 69 Test: Beachcombers.

The Page 69 Test: The Guest Cottage.

--Marshal Zeringue