The Five-Star Weekend

I inhaled The Five-Star Weekend while on vacation, and it was like being on two vacations at once. Physically, I was in Vegas listening to the ding-a-ling of slot machines and dodging drunken revelers, but my mind was firmly in glorious Nantucket—happy to be back again in the capable hands of the undisputed queen of the island, Elin Hilderbrand.

Warning: this book will make you hungry. Hilderbrand’s protagonist Hollis Shaw is an Internet darling, luring millions of viewers with delectable dishes on her site Hungry with Hollis. Her life appears picture perfect, from her swoon-worthy charcuterie boards to the chic tabletops she sets them on. But Hollis’s life comes to a shattering halt when her husband dies in a tragic car crash. Suddenly, making her famous bacon and rosemary pecans doesn’t seem as important as it once was.

To pull herself out of this morass, Hollis invites four friends—one from each decade of her life—to her Nantucket home for a “Five-Star Weekend.” The itinerary is coordinated down to the colors the women will wear on each outing but there are plenty of twists, each one juicier than the next, to complicate the agenda. I found myself laughing, cringing, crying, cheering, and gasping as I tore through the pages of this book. This is a story about friendship, second chances, living in the era of clicks and swipes and reconciling your past and present when they collide.

The Five-Star Weekend is definitely a five-star read!

Hollis Shaw’s life seems picture-perfect. She’s the creator of the popular food blog Hungry with Hollis and is married to Matthew, a dreamy heart surgeon. But after she and Matthew get into a heated argument one snowy morning, he leaves for the airport and is killed in a car accident. The cracks in Hollis’s perfect life—her strained marriage and her complicated relationship with her daughter, Caroline—grow deeper.

So when Hollis hears about something called a “Five-Star Weekend”—one woman organizes a trip for her best friend from each phase of her teenage years, her twenties, her thirties, and midlife—she decides to host her own Five-Star Weekend on Nantucket. But the weekend doesn’t turn out to be a joyful Hallmark movie.

The husband of Hollis’s childhood friend Tatum arranges for Hollis’s first love, Jack Finigan, to spend time with them, stirring up old feelings. Meanwhile, Tatum is forced to play nice with abrasive and elitist Dru-Ann, Hollis’s best friend from UNC Chapel Hill. Dru-Ann’s career as a prominent Chicago sports agent is on the line after her comments about a client’s mental health issues are misconstrued online. Brooke, Hollis’s friend from her thirties, has just discovered that her husband is having an inappropriate relationship with a woman at work. Again! And then there’s Gigi, a stranger to everyone (including Hollis) who reached out to Hollis through her blog. Gigi embodies an unusual grace and, as it happens, has many secrets.