HerKentucky Whiskey Glass Rating: 🥃🥃🥃🥃

Publisher’s synopsis: When Mallory Blessing's son, Link, receives deathbed instructions from his mother to call a number on a slip of paper in her desk drawer, he's not sure what to expect. But he certainly does not expect Jake McCloud to answer. It's the late spring of 2020 and Jake's wife, Ursula DeGournsey, is the frontrunner in the upcoming Presidential election.

There must be a mistake, Link thinks. How do Mallory and Jake know each other?

Flash back to the sweet summer of 1993: Mallory has just inherited a beachfront cottage on Nantucket from her aunt, and she agrees to host her brother's bachelor party. Cooper's friend from college, Jake McCloud, attends, and Jake and Mallory form a bond that will persevere--through marriage, children, and Ursula's stratospheric political rise--until Mallory learns she's dying.

Based on the classic film Same Time Next Year (which Mallory and Jake watch every summer), 28 Summers explores the agony and romance of a one-weekend-per-year affair and the dramatic ways this relationship complicates and enriches their lives, and the lives of the people they love.

HerKentucky Review: 28 Summers is a novel based loosely around the 1978 Ellen Burstyn - Alan Alda film Same Time, Next Year. Like the characters in that film, Ms. Hilderbrand’s protagonists, Mallory and Jake, meet every year for a weekend affair, watching that film on Sunday nights while eating Chinese takeout. Ms. Hilderbrand, long regarded as the queen of the beach read, sets most of her fiction on Nantucket. In her latest work, free-spirited high school English teacher Mallory lives in the Nantucket beach cottage she inherited from her late aunt. Every Labor Day weekend from 1993 to 2019, she welcomes Jake, whom she first meets as her brother’s fraternity buddy and whom the world later knows as the husband of hotshot presidential candidate Ursula de Gournsey. Their affair spans the eponymous 28 summers, with each character leading a completely separate life — marriage, moves, children, cancer treatment, losing parents — for the rest of the year.

Each chapter of Ms. Hilderbrand’s work describes a summer of Jake and Mallory’s romance. She begins each chapter by asking “What are we talking about in [the year at hand]?”, a device that lists political and pop culture moments in a quick-fire manner, transporting the reader to that exact moment in time. This device also served to remind me that I probably would have found the idea of impossible romance much more dreamy and palatable when I was in my twenties than I do now. The Nineties, after all, were a very different time.

28 Summers is a beautiful beach read with quirky, likable characters. I found myself cheering for not only the star-crossed couple, but even for the male protagonist’s driven, icy politician wife. At the same time, I found myself impossibly heartbroken for the female lead, both due to the terms of their relationship and to her health situation. Pour yourself a glass of cold white wine, stream a 1990s radio station, and be prepared to shed a few tears at the end. This book is a must-read if you love Elin HIlderbrand’s Nantucket novels or if you can remember seeing episodes of Friends on their original network airing.

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