Synopsis:
When her twenty-two-year-old stepdaughter, Ruby, announces her engagement to her bisexual, pandemic boyfriend, Gabe, Sarah Danhauser is shocked. Headstrong Ruby has already set a date (just three months away) and spoken to her beloved safta, Sarah’s widowed mother Veronica, about having the wedding at the family’s beach house in Cape Cod. Sarah may be worried, but Veronica is thrilled.
When Veronica purchased the home, she imagined generations of her family gathering there each summer for many years to come. But things didn’t work out that way. Forty years later, Ronnie’s husband is gone. Sarah’s twin brother, Sam, lives in California and rarely makes the trip back home. Sarah packs her kids’ summers full of enriching, educational, resume-building activities that don’t include collecting seashells or playing Frisbee on the beach. For Veronica, the wedding is an opportunity to bring the family together one last time before she puts the house on the market.
Ruby has always known exactly what she wants, but as the wedding date approaches, she’s grappling with wounds inflicted when her mother, Annette, left Ruby with her father, Eli, when Ruby was just a year old. Veronica receives unexpected news, thanks to her sister, that causes her to reevaluate choices she made long ago hen she was a bestselling novelist leading a very different life. Sam suffered a tragic loss and, in the aftermath, confronts big questions about who he is. He hopes to find answers during his stay on the Cape. Eli, normally an attentive husband, has been inexplicably distant during the pandemic. He’s confronting the possible consequences of a long-ago departure from his normal good-guy behavior. And Sarah, frustrated by her husband’s behavior, concerned about her stepdaughter, and worn out by the challenges of life during quarantine, deals with the alluring reappearance of someone from her past . . . and finds herself pondering what could have been.
The wedding day arrives and the family gathers at the Cape. Lovers are revealed as their true selves, misunderstandings take on a life of their own, and long-buried secrets come to light. Confrontations and revelations touch every member of the extended family. Things will never be quite the same again.
The Summer Place is the story of a family and all its messy glory. It’s a story about what we sacrifice and how we forgive. It is a love letter from author Jennifer Weiner to the Outer Cape, the power of home, the way our lives are enriched by the people we call family, and the endless ways love can surprise us.
Review:
The New York Times calls bestselling author Jennifer Weiner “the undisputed boss of the beach read.” With The Summer Place, she proves that the title is apt. It is the sprawling, epic story of a family and the challenges the individual members are facing. They survived the COVID-19 quarantine, but can they make it through the preparations for and Ruby’s upcoming July 4th wedding at the family home on Cape Cod?
Weiner says she wrote The Summer Place during late 2020 and early 2021. She wanted to tell a story set right after the pandemic about “a family whose members had come through the pandemic year, . . . ” that would be a cross between “a Noël Coward farce and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the pairings are driven by otherworldly interference.” She also wanted to examine the myriad ways in which the quarantine “exposed the fault lines in relationships and the buried foundations of money and privilege and sacrifice that hold up our lives, whether or not we acknowledge that they’re there.”
Weiner could not foresee that her mother would be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in March 2021 and succumb to the disease a mere nine weeks later. Suddenly, the story also became about loss, as well as the relationships between mothers and daughters, “and how the torch gets passed from one mother to the next.” And The Summer Place became a love letter to her beloved mother’s enduring spirit.
Weiner focuses each chapter in The Summer Place on one of her characters, revealing their history and background, life experiences, and the choices that brought them to their present circumstances. Ruby met Gabriel Andrews in college and he is the first boy she has ever loved. “Ruby For Sure,” as her father, Eli, calls her, makes up her mind and gets what she wants. And what she thought she wanted was to marry Gabe, who makes her feel safe and loved. During the pandemic, she and Gabe lived with Eli and her stepmother, Sarah, along with her two younger half-brothers, in the family’s four-story brownstone in Brooklyn. Now they have settled into their own apartment. When she announced their engagement at Shabbat dinner, she expected someone to try to talk her out of it. Surprisingly, no one did, and Ruby is becoming increasingly convinced that she has made a bad decision. Perhaps for the first time.
Eli Danhauser, a periodontist, was a single father for seven years after his wife, Annette, left him and Ruby. She made it clear that she never wanted to marry, have children, and settle down. In fact, when she discovered she was pregnant, she didn’t even plan to tell Eli. But he found the pregnancy test and convinced her they should marry so he could provide insurance for her and the baby. He also promised that if Annette was truly unhappy, she could walk away without repercussions. Annette was very clear about her lack of maternal instinct. Eli was equally clear, except that he only wanted to defer having a family, while Annette never wanted one at all. And when Ruby was just a year old, Annette did, in fact, leave.
At just twenty-five years of age, Sarah wasn’t really equipped to become a stepmother. And it wasn’t easy. But she loved Eli, and her parents, Lee and Veronica, adored Ruby and loved spending time with and doting on her. Sarah wisely gave Ruby space to grow fond of her and eventually that’s what happened. Sarah and Eli’s marriage has been happy, especially with the addition of their two sons to whom Ruby has been a devoted big sister. As a young woman Sarah made the difficult decision not to pursue a career as a concert pianist. Instead, she earned a liberal arts degree and has enjoyed a successful career developing music curricula. But she has always harbored doubts as to whether she chose correctly.
Veronica, aka Ronnie, always wanted to be a writer and eventually accepted that her novels were commercial works. She acquired an agent, fielded offers from several publishers, and her first book was not only published. It was also adapted into a film. Her second novel was also published, but Ronnie was living dual lives. She loved her husband, Lee, an attorney, but when she went to New York City for meetings and events, she was a different woman. She was Veronica, an ambitious, successful, and powerful writer who even dressed differently than Ronnie. And she had an affair about which Lee never found out. She was never sure if Lee fathered Sarah and Sam, but he didn’t suspect that he might not be. Ronnie did not like the person she became when she was in New York City, and she was happy living the life she chose — as a wife and mother. But she never stopped writing, even though she did not publish any more books. Now widowed, she lives full-time at the Cape, maintaining her secrets, including the stack of unpublished novels tucked away in her closet. She may have to confront the fallout from the truth, depending on the results yielded by the DNA testing kits her sister has purchased as birthday presents for Sarah and Sam.
Until he was thirty-four years old and met Julie, a single mother, Sam’s relationships with women never lasted more than six months. He was the “dumpee” so many times that he began breaking up with his girlfriends before they could dump him. But he and Julie were happy because Julie was needy, and she made him feel capable and strong. Her son Connor’s biological father was perpetually absent which gave Sam a chance to form a strong bond with the boy, fortunately. Because when tragedy struck, Connor needed the stability and love that Sam provided him. Over the years, some of his girlfriends and Sarah observed that Sam didn’t appear to really know who he was, having been been something of a chameleon his entire life. “I feel like there’s this piece of you that maybe you’re not entirely sure about yet,” Sarah told him. Sam decides it’s time to finally figure out what is missing from his life.
The COVID-19 pandemic takes a toll on each of Weiner’s characters, but none more so than Sarah. Suddenly she and Eli are both working at home, and the boys are attending school via Zoom. They urge Ruby to come home for the sake of her safety, and permit her to bring Gabe with her. Eli becomes withdrawn, uncommunicative, and Sarah grows convinced that he must be having an affair, although she can’t imagine when he would have time to get involved with another woman when he is always at home, traipsing through the house in his noisy flip-flops and getting on Sarah’s nerves. As the pandemic draws to a close and the world begins opening up, the boys return to school and Sarah returns to work, too. But she rents a studio and escapes there to find solace and practice the piano, as she ponders why her once-happy marriage seems to have fallen apart and Eli refuses to even discuss what’s wrong. Things become even more complicated when she runs into Owen, her first-ever love who broke up with her via email when he left for college and refused to ever speak to her again. He’s now a handsome FBI agent who wants to explain what actually transpired two decades ago.
All of Weiner’s characters are fully developed, with lush backstories that inform and provide context to their present circumstances and conundrums. Each character is empathetic, relatable, and flawed in some fundamental fashion. Although she loves her children dearly, Sarah questions the life-defining choice she made years ago. Was giving up her potential career as a professional musician the right move? Can the problems in her marriage be repaired, particularly given that she has no understanding of what or who has managed to drive a wedge between her and Eli? Gabe’s presence dredges up a brief time in Eli’s life when he exhibited poor judgment and engaged in behavior about which he has remained deeply ashamed. He can’t bring himself to discuss it with Sarah, instead growing increasingly neurotic and permitting himself to become estranged from the woman he loves. He suspects there is a terrifying link between his conduct and Gabe that could derail Ruby’s plans for a happy married life. But he is thwarted in his efforts to obtain confirmation before traveling to Cape Cod for the wedding. Ronnie receives disturbing and unexpected news from her physician during her annual check-up. She knows she has to share the information with the family, but is set on doing so after the wedding so as not to ruin Ruby’s special day. Sam is surprised by the dawning realization of what the “missing piece” of himself might be, and begins exploring his feelings, making a new friend in the process. But he resolves to sneak away for a bit and put his theory to the test when he and Connor are in Cape Cod for Ruby’s wedding. Ensconced in Ronnie’s guesthouse, her wedding dress in its clear plastic garment bag, hanging on the back of the bathroom door, Ruby makes a momentous decision and shortly thereafter encounters her mother, Annette, arriving for the ceremony.
Weiner deftly orchestrates the revelation of her character’s secrets and the fallout from them. Not every secret, once brought to light, is destructive, and some end up having no impact at all or actually bring about healing. Other truths remain hidden, and Weiner leaves it to her readers to decide if that outcome is wise or could constitute a smoldering mistake with the potential to have draconian consequences at some future time. There are confrontations that bring resolution and misunderstandings that are ironed out, much to the relief of those affected. At least one development is shocking, wildly improbable, and so outrageous that it is almost exquisitely perfect.
The story moves at a brisk pace and the dialogue is crisp, often witty, and believable. The characters’ internal struggles are compelling and emotionally resonant. But Weiner injects humorous aspects to the story that keep it from becoming maudlin or cloying, and she astutely prevents the characters from taking themselves too seriously, the one exception being Eli. But his earnestness and struggle to forgive himself are core aspects of his personality.
The Summer Place depicts family members who are devoted to each other but don’t always listen to or find it easy to love one another. The pandemic was a trying period of time for Weiner’s characters, just as it was, in varying degrees, for every single one of her readers. It caused Weiner’s characters to do what so many people around the world did: reevaluate. Being quarantined for months with close family members highlighted habits and idiosyncrasies that might easily be overlooked under normal circumstances. Weiner compassionately examines how one family not only survived, but managed to emerge from those dark days with a greater appreciation for each other, reconciled to their pasts, and committed to the future. Together. And she does so in entertaining and big-hearted fashion, making The Summer Place a book everyone who enjoys family dramas should read at the beach or by the pool this summer.
Excerpt from The Summer Place
Chapter One
Ruby Getting Married
On a Friday night in April 2021, Sarah Weinberg Danhauser lit a match and bent over the Shabbat candles in the dining room of her brownstone in Park Slope. Dinner was on the table: roast chicken glazed with honey; homemade stuffing with mushrooms and walnuts; fresh-baked challah; and a salad with fennel and blood oranges, sprinkled with pomegranate seeds so expensive that Sarah had guiltily shoved the container, with its damning price tag, deep down into the recycling bin, lest her husband see.
Eli, her husband, sat at the head of the table, with their sons, Dexter, who was eight, and Miles, almost seven, on the left side of the table and Eli’s brother, Ari, between them. Ari, twice-divorced and currently single, had become a regular Friday-night guest at the Danhausers’ table. He wasn’t Sarah’s favorite person, with his gleaming good looks and his charming, nearly sly smile—not to mention how, at least once a year he hit Eli up for a check so that he could pay his child support—but Eli had begged, and pleaded (“The poor guy thinks Flamin’ Hot Cheetos are an entire food group! He needs a home-cooked meal”), and had finally prevailed.
On the other side of the table sat Ruby, Sarah’s stepdaughter, and Ruby’s pandemic boyfriend, Gabe. Sarah supposed she should just call Gabe a boyfriend, minus the qualifier, but the way their romance had been fast-forwarded thanks to Covid meant that, in her mind, he’d always be a boyfriend with an asterisk beside his name. Gabe and Ruby had been together for just six weeks before NYU shut down and sent everyone home. Ruby had come back to her bedroom in Brooklyn, and Gabe, who was from California, had tagged along. The two had been inseparable that pandemic year, all the way through their virtual graduation, whether they were snuggling on the couch bingeing Netflix or taking long, rambling walks through the city, holding hands and wearing matching face masks, or starting a container victory garden on the brownstone’s roof, which eventually yielded a bumper crop of lettuce and kale, a handful of wan carrots, and a single seedy watermelon (“Next year will be better,” Ruby promised, after posting a series of photos of the melon on her Instagram).
They’d stayed together through the summer, into the winter, and, after the new year, when the pandemic had finally loosened its grip, they’d gotten vaccinated, gotten jobs—Ruby as assistant stage manager for an independent theater company in Jackson Heights; Gabe as a paralegal—taken several of their favorite plants, and moved out of Brooklyn and into a tiny studio in the West Village, where they’d been cohabitating for just over a month.
Sarah finished the blessing over the wine and the bread. The platters of food had made their first trip around the table (Ari, Sarah noticed, helped himself to the largest piece of breast meat and both of the wings) when Ruby, beaming blissfully, took her boyfriend by the hand. “Gabe and I have some news,” she said.
Sarah felt a freezing sensation spread from her heart to her belly. She forced her mouth into a smile as she turned to Ruby and her young man, thinking that, if the news was what she thought, it wasn’t good news. She shot a quick, desperate look down the table, in Eli’s direction, hoping for a nod, a shared glance, any kind of gesture or expression that would say I understand how you feel and I agree, or—even better—I will shut down this foolishness, don’t you worry. But Eli was looking at his plate, completely oblivious as he chewed, the way he’d been completely oblivious for more than a year.
“What’s that, honey?” Sarah asked, even though the heavy, frozen feeling inside her chest told her that she already knew.
“Gabe and I are getting married!” Ruby said. Her expression was exultant, her pale cheeks were flushed. Beside her, Gabe wore his usual good-natured, affable look—more like a man excited because he’d learned that tonight’s dessert was his favorite than a man who’d found his life partner, the woman for whom he’d forsake all others, Sarah thought. His dark hair looked a little unruly, his deep-set dark-brown eyes seemed sleepy. Sarah had always felt like Gabe was more of a contemporary of Miles and Dexter than he was a young man, ready to take a wife and, presumably, start a family. Not that Gabe wasn’t a good guy. He was. He was well-mannered and considerate, supremely easygoing. He never got angry, and he almost always looked pleased. Or maybe he just looked stoned. Sarah had never been able to tell, and these days, with pot being legal, she couldn’t complain about the smell that had sometimes seeped down the stairs from the attic when Ruby and Gabe had been in residence. It’s no different than having a beer, Eli had told her, and Sarah agreed intellectually, but somehow it still felt different, illicit and wrong.
“Way to go, man!” said Ari, extending his hand across the table so Gabe could high-five him. “Up top!” he said to Ruby, who grinned and slapped his palm.
“Can we be in the wedding?” asked Dexter. Dexter, their older boy, looked like his father, tall and lanky and a little clumsy, with big feet and curly hair and elbows that always seemed to find the nearest pitcher or water glass.
“We can be best men!” said Miles. Miles was more compactly built than his brother, with fine brown hair, and his movements were careful and precise as he maneuvered his silverware.
“We’ve got an even better job for you guys,” said Ruby. “We’re going to get married in July, on the Cape. I already asked Grandma, and she says it’s fine. She knows it’s my favorite time of year there . . .”
“. . . so soon!” Sarah blurted, then gulped at her wine. Ruby had always been a determined, headstrong girl. She hated to be thwarted; hated the words No, or Let’s think it over, or, worst of all, Slow down. Even a whiff of a hint that her stepmother opposed this match, or thought that Ruby, at twenty-two, was too young to marry anyone, would have Gabe and Ruby at City Hall with a marriage license by week’s end. Even worse: Ruby had told Sarah’s mother before she’d told Sarah herself. Sarah’s face got hot. She felt the iciness dig more deeply into her midriff; a tightness toward the back of her throat that had gotten too familiar during the pandemic, a feeling she’d ascribed to too much togetherness.
Sarah had met Ruby fourteen years ago, when Ruby was just eight years old, a skinny, pigtailed girl walking down the hall of the Manhattan Music School, where Sarah was the executive director. She’d noticed Ruby right away. Or, rather, she’d noticed Ruby’s father, tall, bespectacled, and a little awkward, one of a handful of men in the sea of women; towering over most of the moms and nannies who sat, waiting on the benches outside the kids’ classrooms.
“Miss Sarah, do you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend?” Ruby had asked one day after class, staring up at Sarah very seriously as her father blushed and murmured about manners.
“Not at the moment,” Sarah had said.
“My dad makes excellent grilled-cheese sandwiches,” Ruby said. “I think you should come to our house and let him make you one.”
Sarah had been charmed . . . and then Eli had put his hand on Ruby’s shoulder, gently steering her toward the other kids, saying, “I’ve got it from here.”
Eli had taken Sarah to dinner that Saturday night, and to a Philip Glass concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the following week. Even though Sarah had never pictured herself marrying a man more than ten years her senior, a man who was divorced, with full custody of a child, employed as a periodontist. Back when she’d made lists of what she wanted in a husband, any one of those qualities would have been an automatic disqualifier. She’d wanted a man her age, unencumbered, in the arts, somehow, a painter or a writer or a musician, not a man who did root canals and gum grafts for a living.
But Eli won her over with his steadiness and maturity and his appreciation for the world Sarah had once hoped to inhabit. He read reviews and began following classical-music blogs. He took her to hear chamber music concerts and piano recitals, where he was unstinting in his admiration for the musicians. When she’d asked if he’d ever taken lessons, he’d shaken his head. “Two years of recorder. No talent whatsoever. But I love it. And someone has to be the audience, right?” he’d said. “We can’t all be soloists.” She’d smiled, a little sadly, because once, that had been her plan, but she’d put that dream away, long ago. She loved the way Eli noticed what she liked, the way that he took care of her. If they went out and the weather turned cold, he’d wrap her up in his jacket and insist that she wore it home. If he noticed her enjoying a certain vintage at dinner, he’d have a bottle sent to her house the next night. He bought her clothes without asking her for her sizes (later she learned that he’d discreetly asked her best friend); he gave her a pair of beautiful gold and amethyst earrings to mark their first month of what he called “going steady.” Best of all was his devotion to Ruby. A man who loved his daughter, who was a good father, would be a good husband, too.
She’d been right, for the most part. Eli had been a wonderful husband, even if Ruby had been a handful early on. Ruby, who’d liked Sarah just fine when she was Miss Sarah at music school, had resented Sarah terribly when things went from being theoretical to actual, and when Sarah went from being a fun companion who showed up on the weekends and took Ruby to get mani-pedis or tea to a full-time, live-in partner to Ruby’s father, who made sure that Ruby did her homework, cleared her dishes, and finished her chores.
Sarah persevered through the resentment and nastiness, the tantrums and tears. She’d made allowances after Eli told her that Ruby’s mother, Annette, had walked out before Ruby’s first birthday. She’d done her best to ignore it, to not be hurt when Ruby made rude remarks or hid her house keys or left unflattering drawings of Sarah (her chin extra-pointy, her mouth gaping wide, presumably mid-yell) lying around where Sarah was sure to find them. She hadn’t flinched whenever Ruby made a point of correcting anyone who got it wrong: Sarah’s not my real mother. It had taken Sarah years of patience, years of ignoring slights large and small, years of extending her hand and having it slapped away, to finally arrive at the moment, right around her thirteenth birthday, when Ruby had softened and began to let her in.
It hadn’t hurt, Sarah thought, that Annette, Ruby’s biological mother, had remained supremely uninterested in parenting. Annette, who had no actual career and no permanent address, had always focused on herself and her passions, whatever they currently were: learning to throw pottery or to apply henna designs, performing slam poetry in Seattle, or building costumes for an avant-garde theater company in Brazil. Annette’s creative pursuits came first, her romantic partners came second. Her only child might not have even made the list.
And now Ruby was getting married! Maybe if Sarah had been Ruby’s birth mother, she’d have been comfortable telling Ruby no, she was too young to be promising her entire life to someone; that her brain was not done baking; that she still had the whole world to see and explore. Her father and her biological mother could have said those things, and Ruby might have listened, but Sarah, as a stepmother, had to keep quiet, knowing that if she spoke up she’d only send Ruby running faster in the wrong direction.
“We don’t want a big wedding,” Ruby was saying, with Gabe’s hand still clasped in hers. “Just family and our closest friends. There’s not a lot of planning that we need to do. So there’s really no reason to wait.” Daintily, Ruby speared a drumstick from the platter and set it beside the salad that filled half of her plate.
“What about your dress?” Sarah managed. “And flowers? You’ll need a caterer . . . and invitations can take weeks. Months!” Maybe she could convince Ruby that there were actual, practical reasons why this plan would never work. Sarah cast her mind back to her own big day. She’d been twenty-eight, and she and her mother had spent six months figuring out the details of her wedding to Eli. There’d been a rehearsal dinner at her parents’ house in Truro, then the ceremony on a bluff overlooking the ocean, and, finally, the reception at a vineyard, underneath a tent, on a gorgeous night in early September, when the air was still soft and full of the smell of summer rose hips, the bay still warm enough for skinny-dipping. Late at night, after their rehearsal dinner, she and Eli had gone down to the beach. They’d taken off their clothes and slipped into the water. I thought it was bad luck to see the bride the night before the wedding, he’d said, pulling her close. So close your eyes, she’d whispered back, and pressed the length of her body against his.
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