We'll Always Have Nantucket is a compelling novel that celebrates friendships, both new and everlasting, the abiding pull of family and traditions, and the enduring effort of reconciling the past and understanding that the future always contains the present.
Audacious, environmentalist, surfer-girl, Teddy, abandons her California university position in a fall from grace for a summer on Nantucket to reevaluate her dubious personal and professional choices. In this dual narrative Teddy's mom, Sadie, braids her island visit with her daughter's; their first return to the cherished summer vacation spot since the death of Teddy's father four years ago.
While Teddy rents a carriage-house with three strangers in their late twenties, each caught up in their own holding patterns, Sadie stays with friend, Val, who provides an abiding source of comedy, Tito's, and an unrelenting zeal for Sadie to make some new memories already.
Teddy takes a part-time catering job experiencing the charm and theatrics exclusive to the privileged and moneyed, while her free time brims with personal and environmental contemplation, sharing the surf with one kind of shark or another, and commiserating over a Goombay Smash or three with housemates over the myriad complexities of long-distance relationships, having Teddy question how you know when you've found the one.
Meanwhile, Sadie and Val fill their days with beach shenanigans doused in cocktails, debating the folly of bikinis at age fifty, considering the Nantucket triathlon, and enduring the often-Herculean task of parenting grown children. Intrigue surrounding a missing person and an uptick in shark activity often lands them all at Cisco Brewery, swaying to live reggae and wondering with Bob Marley, "Could you be loved"?