The Summer Place by Jennifer Weiner

Title: The Summer Place

Author: Jennifer Weiner

Publisher: Atria Books

Genre: Contemporary, Romance, Chicklit

First Publication: 2022

Language: English

Book Summary: The Summer Place by Jennifer Weiner

When Veronica Levy bought her dream house on the Outer Cape, she imagined a place where generations of her family would gather for years to come.

Now, forty years later, with her children barely speaking to each other, or to her, Veronica has decided, reluctantly, to put the place on the market. She’ll invite the family to gather one last time (and insist on their good behavior) at her granddaughter Ruby’s wedding. She’ll spend one last summer by the beach, with her daughter Sarah, her son Sam, and whichever grandchildren can be coaxed into making the trip. Then she’ll say goodbye to the house she’s loved for forty years.

But three months is a long time. Time enough for an old love to reappear, for secrets to come to light, and for three generations of Levy women to decide what kind of lives they want to live, in the summers they have left.

The Summer Place is a hilarious, delicious, and wickedly observed story about parents and children, husbands and wives, the places we call home, and all the ways that love can surprise us.

Book Review: The Summer Place by Jennifer Weiner

Grab your biggest sun hat and an extra-large pitcher of frozé, because we’re diving headfirst into Jennifer Weiner’s juiciest beach read yet – The Summer Place. This soapy saga of family dysfunction, long-buried secrets, and more catty insults than the longest-running Real Housewives feud has everything you crave for a deliciously scathing yet utterly earnest summer escape.

The set-up is classic Weiner – a rich, overbearingly Levy clan decamps to their beloved Cape Cod summer house for one final, inevitably disastrous reunion before the matriarch Veronica Levy sells it off. You’ve got family secrets and generations-old grudges brewing, love triangles simmering, and enough inherited trauma to make Freudian analysts rent beachside office space.

At the center of this maelstrom is Sarah, who is struggling just to keep her blended family’s peace as they gather for her stepdaughter Ruby’s rushed wedding. Of course, with a wackadoo mom like Veronica leading the charge, tightly wound control freak Sarah doesn’t stand a chance of keeping the weekend drama-free. Between her kookily estranged twin Sam and regrets over roads not taken with an old flame, you just know the sanity Levys are gonna break.

Speaking of old flames, Sarah’s husband Eli seems to be operating on towel-warmer emotional levels, leaving her vulnerable to the reappearance of someone from her past. Meanwhile, Veronica must reckon with her own romantic regrets when a former lover makes an unwelcome reappearance. Let’s just say the Cape’s sleepy beachfront is about to turn into a Marvel movie’s final battle once everyone’s libidos and decades-stewing resentments reach supernova levels.

Look, let’s be honest here – Jennifer Weiner is an outright master of the deliciously soapy, utterly compulsive beach read, and she brings her A-game to The Summer Place. This book has all the guilty pleasure trappings we’ve come to crave from the reigning queen of modern domestic satire, from cringingly accurate depictions of obscene wealth to cringe comedy surrounding unbearable in-law encounters. If you don’t already have Weiner’s number on speed dial for scathing yet deeply empathetic insights into family psychodrama, well, I don’t know what to tell you.

What elevates The Summer Place from a mere exercise in beach read fluffiness is Weiner’s keen understanding of how to handle a lot going on without losing the tender heartbeat propelling it all forward. Sure, she juggles a frankly absurd number of storylines, romantic entanglements, long-buried traumas, and generational conflicts throughout the Levy family. But she deftly avoids descending into caricature by grounding even her most heightened characters in emotional truth and hard-won wisdom.

Even amidst the most hilariously cringeworthy exchanges of familial venom between these people, you can feel the pulsing heartbeat of Weiner’s empathy and nuanced understanding of why people lash out at those closest to them. The book is an undeniable romp, to be sure, but one that earns its comic stingers and soapy shockers through painstaking character work across multiple generations.

That said, Weiner still seems to take a particular delight in skewering the entitlement and casual cruelties of the upper-crust Cape Cod aristocracy at the center of it all. There’s an undercurrent of social satire too delicious to resist. This is a world utterly foreign to most of us, and yet Weiner roots around in its ugliest prejudices with an anthropological zeal.

While the brunt of the drama hinges on the Levy family’s internal power struggles, Weiner seems to recognize that some of her most indelible characters emanate from the margins. Who could forget scene-stealers like Ruby’s fiercely protective safta Veronica fighting for her granddaughter’s future? Even the most tertiary players in this dysfunctional circus parade get their own shadings and inner life, treated not as stale comic relief but living, breathing people dealing with the inescapable gravitational pull of family.

For all the zippy one-liners and beachy escapism, Weiner really sticks the landing when it comes to crafting an honest, quietly profound statement about the baggage we all inherit – and the ways even the most well-adjusted families can contort under the weight of intergenerational trauma. At times, you can practically feel the ennui and stifling loneliness radiating off the impeccably curated Cape properties as various characters wrestle with their personal shortcomings. Sure, these folks want for nothing in a material sense. But there’s a hollowness there, too, one possibly only remedied by finally opening up and letting light into the dustiest familial chambers.

In moments like Sarah’s breakthrough self-reckoning, Weiner lets through rays of vulnerability and wisdom amidst the antic insanity. These are characters recognizing it’s okay to look inward, grapple with your own stunted growth, and absolve themselves of others’ shortcomings. Only then can baggage be shed, old wounds finally heal over, forgotten loves rekindled. Weiner clearly has immense compassion for the messy process of claiming ownership over one’s identity, a generosity of spirit starkly set against the shallows often occupied by the genre-at-large.

At its big beating heart, The Summer Place is a profound yet utterly addictive testament to the resilient power of families—both the ones we’re born into and the ad-hoc bands of misfits we construct as feeling our way through life’s soapiest operatics. It’s an empathetic satire of old money foibles, yes, but one clearly rooted in the understanding that love, trauma, and forgiveness are inextricably woven into every family tapestry, no matter the tax bracket.

For every cringe-inducing callout of the cape’s casual xenophobia or withering dismantling of inherited privilege, Weiner balances it with moments of shining humanity breaking through. Tragic revelations about absentee parents are bookended by hard-won breakthroughs of reconciliation later. Generations-old resentments and parental wounds precipitate surprisingly deep intergenerational dialogues on the nature of love and family. Just when you think this shindig couldn’t get more chaotic, a new bloom of empathy and understanding peeks out from the wreckage.

The Summer Place is high melodrama and grounded character work, acerbic humor and gentle life wisdom, all masterfully synthesized into that rarest of achievements—a work of equally smashing entertainment value and resonant introspection. So fly to your local beach town, grab your biggest hat and coldest refreshment, and settle in for the most addictive dramedy of like, blood, and old money on this side of the Outer Cape. This sprawling exploration of life’s inherited baggage is messy as hell…but oh so worth the entanglement.