"She chooses Nantucket and the glamorous life she associates with it" — and somewhere around hour three, while Denise and I were walking the lakefront on a Saturday morning that felt more like August than May, I realized I was listening to a book about a woman making the exact kind of romantic, impulsive life decision that sounds wonderful in your twenties and terrifying by thirty-five.
Let me set the stage. Jenny is twenty-nine, a university professor in Kansas City — and as someone who has spent two decades in education, I can tell you that "established university professor" at twenty-nine is doing some heavy fictional lifting. But Nancy Thayer isn't really writing about academia. She's writing about the gravitational pull of place, about how a specific island can rewire your sense of what your life should look like. And honestly? That part works. Thayer has written thirty-eight novels, many of them set on Nantucket, and you can feel her genuine affection for the place in every description of harbor light and salt-weathered shingle.
The Two-Man Problem (And Why It Didn't Quite Land)
Here's where I struggled as an English teacher who spends his days trying to get seventeen-year-olds to understand that characters need interior lives. Jenny is caught between two men — one representing her Kansas City roots, one representing the Nantucket dream — and the novel wants us to feel torn alongside her. But the men read more like lifestyle catalogs than people. One is stability and the familiar; the other is excitement and the aspirational. This reminds me of what Hemingway said about the importance of the iceberg — what's beneath the surface matters more than what's on top. And with Jenny's two love interests, I kept waiting for the iceberg and mostly got the tip.
The writing itself has been called "stilted" by some readers, and I'd say that's half-right. There are moments where the prose feels like it's in a hurry to tell you what's happening rather than letting you sit inside a scene. For a 10-hour listen, I never felt the book drag exactly, but I also never felt that pull where you park the car and sit in the driveway because you can't stop. It's pleasant. It moves. It's the literary equivalent of a beach read, which — and I say this with love — is exactly what it's designed to be.
Emily Sutton-Smith and the Curious Case of the Southern Midwesterners
Sutton-Smith is a solid narrator. Her pacing is good, her emotional register is reliable, and she differentiates characters well enough that you're never confused about who's speaking. But here's the thing that kept pulling me out of the story: her Kansas City characters sound Southern. Not aggressively so, not like she's doing Blanche DuBois, but there's a drawl creeping into voices that should sound flat and Midwestern. As someone who grew up hearing those flat vowels — and who teaches kids from Chicago, which has its own very specific sound — this kind of regional slippage is distracting once you notice it.
It's a small thing, and I suspect most listeners won't care. But the narrator understands that pause is punctuation, and Sutton-Smith does handle the quieter emotional beats with care. When Jenny is wrestling with her decision, the narration slows appropriately, lets the weight settle. That's craft. I just wish the accent work had received the same attention.
Who This Is Really For (And Who Should Keep Walking)
If you loved Thayer's previous Nantucket novels, this is comfortable territory. It's summer in audio form — low stakes, warm settings, a love triangle that resolves without anyone getting genuinely hurt. My students would hate this. I didn't love it either, but I didn't hate it. It's a perfectly fine vacation listen. I kept thinking of Taken, which landed in similar beach-read territory but at least kept me genuinely uncertain about where things were headed.
But if you're looking for the kind of contemporary fiction that surprises you, that makes you rethink something about how people actually make choices — this isn't it. Jenny's decision feels predetermined from the opening chapters, and the "unexpected turn" the description promises is more of a gentle curve. If you loved Elin Hilderbrand's Nantucket books, this is its quieter, less dramatic cousin.
The prose deserves to be savored? Not exactly. But it deserves to be heard while you're doing something pleasant — a walk, a long drive, folding laundry on a Sunday afternoon. It's background-friendly without being forgettable. Just don't expect it to follow you into your dreams.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For?
Not this time. I'd save my covert-listening energy for something with more teeth. But if Principal Martinez's budget presentation is particularly brutal and you need something warm and uncomplicated to survive it — well, you could do worse than ten hours on Nantucket with Jenny and her two perfectly nice men.
