HEAT WAVE (NANCY THAYER)

 

 

Story Description: 

 

Random House|May 29, 2012|Trade Paperback|ISBN: 978-0-345-51832-3 

 

Lyrical, emotional, dramatic, and packed with Nancy Thayer’s trademark warmth and wisdom, Heat Wave tells the moving story of a woman who, after her seemingly perfect life unravels, must find the strength to live and love again. 

 

After her husband’s sudden death, Carley Winsted is determined to keep her two daughters in their beloved home on Nantucket.  To ease the family’s financial strain, she decides to transform their, grand, historic house into a bed-and-breakfast.  Not everyone, however, thinks this plan prudent or quite respectable – especially not Carley’s mother-in-law.  Further complicating a myriad of challenges, a friend forces Carley to keep a secret that, if revealed, will undo families and friendships.  And her late husband’s former law partner is making Carley confront an array of mixed feelings.  Then, during a late-summer heat wave, the lives of Carley and her friends and family will be forever changed in entirely unexpected ways. 

 

My Review: 

 

I absolutely loved this story.  Carley Winsted and her two daughters, Cisco and Margaret are grieving over the death of their husband and father.  He died suddenly of an undiagnosed heart condition in the prime of his life.  Cisco is bent on becoming a ballerina and throws herself into practising but she doesn’t have the build for it and her mother is worried how she is going to take the news once she is told.  As a pre-teen, Carley is expecting Cisco to crumble. 

 

Carley needs to either find a job or turn her in-laws beautiful old family home into a bed-and-breakfast to make an income for her and the girls to survive on.  However, Annabel, her rather stoic mother-in-law isn’t at all happy with that news but Carley goes ahead and decides to do it anyway.  She is gloriously happy and is really cut-out for the job. 

 

Carley’s best friends run into a bump when one of the other husband and wives gets together with another’s husband and throws a monkey wrench into the friendship.  Carley is the only one that knows what is going on and struggles whether to tell her best friend, the wife, the her husband is sleeping with another of their friend’s wives.  What will she do?  She knows it’ll cause hard feelings all around. 

 

Wyatt, her deceased husband’s best friend is causing Carley to have feelings she hasn’t had in quite some time and she’s worried because her husband hasn’t even been dead quite a year yet.  She questions whether she should be falling in love with someone so soon after his death.  Will she take up a relationship with Wyatt. 

 

Then something terrible happens to, Vanessa, one of her best friends, and everything in Carley’s world changes forever. 

 

Nancy Thayer has written a real story about real women.  She has an uncanny knack for taking real life situations and putting them in story mode.  This novel is completely believable and I actually know someone who several of these issues happened too.  I love her books and always highly recommend them.  Well done, once again, Nancy