Elin Hilderbrand's The Five-Star Weekend had been sitting on my bookshelf (horizontally, as all my as-of-yet-unread books do), since Christmas. It's Hilderbrand's second-to-last novel, and I wanted to savor it. Kind of like how you "savor" a box of salt water taffy by hiding it in your pantry for months and then plowing through it all in one sitting. Because that's what happened once I finally cracked Weekend. I couldn't put it down until I'd greedily gobbled the last lobster roll, swim, and sunset.
Newly widowed Nantucket influencer Hollis Shaw is looking for a way to break free from her funk. So when she hears about something called the "Five-Star Weekend," she's game. The idea is to invite one friend from each decade of her life: her teens, '20s, '30s, and midlife (in her case, '50s). So that's what she does, even though her relationships with these women are shaky. She's semi-estranged from one, two are enemies of each other's, and one she met only online. What ensues is three days of fabulous food, fashion, and --of course -- fireworks.
My favorite thing about Hilderbrand's books is how she gets inside her characters' heads. I always feel like I know them, flaws and all, making me care what happens. It was the same with The Five-Star Weekend. As the online outlier put it:
' "The thing I love best about reading fiction is that it gives you a way to connect the experiences of your own life to the larger world." '
Precisely.
I guess wisdom can come from Internet weirdos. 😏
