Review: Summer of '69 by Elin Hilderbrand

This review has been brewing for about 2 weeks and I am finally sitting down to write it! If you’ve been reading here a while, you know how much I love Elin Hilderbrand. It’s been a love affair since 2011 and I think it’s safe to say that her books just keep getting better and better. 

Summer of ’69 tells the story of the blended Foley-Levin family during the Summer of 1969 on Nantucket Island. In typical Hilderbrand fashion, the story is told from multiple perspectives so we get to know Blair, Kirby, Kate, and Jessie very well. The women in this family are remarkable and I love how passionately Hilderbrand told this story, which surrounds a fictional family living in many of the same circumstances as her own the summer she was born. Make sure you read the acknowledgments at the end for more details! 

The Summer of 1969 was one of the most tumultuous and progressive in history. The Vietnam War raged on; NASA was preparing for the moon landing; JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr. had all been assassinated, and now Richard Nixon was President. For the Foley-Levin family, things were just beginning to brew. Blair is pregnant, bored at home after leaving her teaching job and marrying an MIT astrophysicist who will be instrumental at mission control. Kirby is trying to prove how self sufficient is and gets a job working the graveyard shift at the Shiretown Inn on Martha’s Vineyard. Jessica is devastated to be spending the summer alone with their old fashioned and judgmental grandmother on Nantucket. And Kate, their mother, just wants her son Tiger to be sent home safely from Vietnam. 

All the Foley-Levin women are confronted with the difficulties of being a woman in 1969 and with the ghosts of the past and future. 

I loved this book, truly. And amazingly, it is Hilderbrand’s first #1 New York Times best seller. It’s well deserved because I truly think it’s one of her best! It’s well rounded, forcing the reader to confront some extremely difficult topics that are still relevant today but also deeply entertaining and the story of a family at its core.