I admit that I was once a snob about “beach reads.” It took one Elin Hilderbrand novel to open my eyes: “Nantucket Nights.” (A woman goes missing off Great Point Beach.
Drowning? Suicide? Murder?) But it wasn’t just the mystery I fell into — it was the sense of place Hilderbrand evoked. Many of Hilderbrand’s Nantucket-set books had me dreaming of rolling sand dunes, smelling Coppertone, packing chicken salad sandwiches, staking backyard tomatoes, and tossing towels into the Jeep for a quick ocean dip. For those of us lucky enough to have good summer memories, Hilderbrand books let us escape into the best of them, and that escape is the true beauty of a beach read.
When done with thought, they render place so vividly as to transport utterly. But when simply churned out, they can be, at best, forgettable. Advertisement The so-called “Queen of the Beach Read” knows this.
That’s why she’s retiring. “I’m out of ideas. I could tell it was happening when I wrote ‘Golden Girl.
’ I knew ‘Swan Song’ was the goodbye. I just couldn’t find any fresh takes,” Hilderbrand, 55, says in a phone interview from her Nantucket home. She knows she has a legion of devoted fans.
For them, “I’ve tried to deliver high-quality escapist wish-fulfillment beach books every summer. I never want to write something where they felt: ‘She’s done this already.’” Born in Boston and raised in Pennsylvania, Hilderbrand has delivered Nantucket-set beach books since 20.