Why You'll Love This
A wealthy family locked on a private island for a week, and every single one of them is hiding something — MacLean's first contemporary novel hits like a cold wave.
- Great if you want: family drama with sharp edges and real romantic tension
- The experience: propulsive and atmospheric — cloistered, pressure-cooker pacing
- The writing: MacLean writes desire and dysfunction with equal precision and heat
- Skip if: you prefer tightly plotted mysteries over character-driven suspense
About This Book
When their larger-than-life patriarch dies, the Storm siblings converge on the family's private Rhode Island island for what should be a brief, contained funeral. Alice, the one who escaped the family's orbit years ago, intends to keep it that way — in and out before the old wounds reopen. But their father, it turns out, engineered one final move from beyond the grave, and suddenly a week that was supposed to be simple becomes something far more dangerous. These Summer Storms is about what happens when a family built on performance and wealth is finally forced to stop performing — and what ugly, tender things surface when there's nowhere left to run.
Sarah MacLean brings her romance writer's instincts to contemporary fiction, and the result is a novel with real heat beneath its cool, privileged surface. The pacing is knife-sharp, the dialogue crackles with the specific venom only siblings can deploy, and MacLean understands that desire — for love, for approval, for escape — drives people to their worst decisions. This is a book that rewards close reading; the family dynamics are layered carefully enough that small details land harder in retrospect.
