The Rumor

June 1, 2015
Hilderbrand's latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic-and hilarious-impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands. Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie's thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks' teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks' friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion's share of Madeline's last advance, in Eddie's latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that "a room of her own" will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie's spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie "temporarily" unable to return the 50K, what's a writer to do but to appropriate Grace's adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline's rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as "the Playboy Channel meets HGTV"), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, "that other Nantucket novelist," nor this magazine, "the notoriously cranky Kirkus." Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.

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June 1, 2015
In this enjoyable comedy of manners, Hilderbrand returns to Nantucket, the setting of her 14 previous novels. Madeline, a best-selling author, is happily married to Trevor. Her best friend, Grace, is married to successful real-estate developer Eddie and lives in a much grander house with extensive grounds. Grace's passion for gardening leads her to hire and carry on with Benton Coe, a hunky landscape architect. At the same time, Madeline is struggling to write the second novel in a two-book deal. She can't afford to return her advance, so, desperate to get over her writer's block, she submits to her publisher the story of Grace's affair, very thinly disguised. Eddie, meanwhile, resorts to questionable measures to shore up his precarious finances, while Madeline's son, Brick, and Grace's twin daughters, Allegra (the cool one) and Hope (the smart one), negotiate their own teen hell of envy and gossip. Hilderbrand does her usual expert job of evoking the Nantucket setting and portraying flawed but likable characters, and the value of family and friendship is affirmed at the end.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2015

Nantucket-based author Madeline King has a forthcoming novel that shouts best seller but spills all about closest friend Grace's affair. As long-held resentments boil over, a dangerous stranger exploits the two women. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

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