Book Club Recap: A Hundred Summers by Beatriz Williams

Belinda and I are in a book group/club together; it’s how we met. It’s called Ladies’ Book Group–creative, I know. She agreed to write a recap of what our group discussed at our monthly get-together.

If you belong to a book group, please tell us about what you’re reading in the comments. If you would like to join this feature, please feel free to do so by posting your own Book Club Recap and linking it in the comments. 

Our non-booklover friends will never understand the kinship we share discussing how our favorite stories touch our lives. But that’s where we begin the night’s talk about A Hundred Summers by Beatriz Williams.

Our group admired Lily’s ability “to stay true to herself” through a time of rapidly changing societal pressures.

Several women tried to imagine how their parents’ and grandparents’ lives played out in the same decade as our fictional characters.

“Would Mom have tried some of the same stunts Budgie pulled?”

The general consensus was: Oh yeah, our parents or grandparents were at least as bold and exciting as the characters in the book. They survived the unimaginable, braved the formidable, and inspired us to push forward into the unknown.

If memory serves me, it was at this point somebody broke out chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter icing effectively ending all literary discussions.

We shared our own struggles with kids, jobs, keeping up with technology.

“So what happens to my Nook if they break off with Barnes and Noble?”

This is just one of the many pressing issues for a group of grown women, now shamelessly dipping our fingers into a decadent mountain of icing.

Sadly, we’re skipping next month’s gathering because it falls on a holiday. I’ll miss giving myself permission to toss the diet and manners and laugh like a kid for that too short window of time we call “book group meeting.”

A Hundred Summers
written by Beatriz Williams
published by Putnam Adult

find it here: (affiliate links) Barnes & Noble, Amazon, iBooks, Book Depository, Goodreads

About the book – from Goodreads: Memorial Day, 1938: New York socialite Lily Dane has just returned with her family to the idyllic oceanfront community of Seaview, Rhode Island, expecting another placid summer season among the familiar traditions and friendships that sustained her after heartbreak. 

That is, until Greenwalds decide to take up residence in Seaview.

Nick and Budgie Greenwald are an unwelcome specter from Lily’s past: her former best friend and her former fiancé, now recently married—an event that set off a wildfire of gossip among the elite of Seaview, who have summered together for generations. Budgie’s arrival to restore her family’s old house puts her once more in the center of the community’s social scene, and she insinuates herself back into Lily’s friendship with an overpowering talent for seduction…and an alluring acquaintance from their college days, Yankees pitcher Graham Pendleton. But the ties that bind Lily to Nick are too strong and intricate to ignore, and the two are drawn back into long-buried dreams, despite their uneasy secrets and many emotional obligations. 

Under the scorching summer sun, the unexpected truth of Budgie and Nick’s marriage bubbles to the surface, and as a cataclysmic hurricane barrels unseen up the Atlantic and into New England, Lily and Nick must confront an emotional cyclone of their own, which will change their worlds forever.