This is a multiple point of view historical fiction set primarily during the summer of 1969, although the book does eventually close in November. It follows the Levin family, particularly the women, as they navigate a tumultuous summer season. It's told through the points of view the mother, Kate, and her three daughters, Blair, Kirby, and Jessica, interspersed with letters from the son/brother, Tiger, who is deployed in Vietnam.
The Levin family typically spends their summers at All's Fair, a summer home on Nantucket that is owned by the family's matriarch, Exalta (Nonny). The summer of 1969, however, is different. Tiger is in Vietnam, Blair is pregnant with twins, and Kirby has gotten a summer job on Martha's Vineyard, leaving only 13-year-old Jessica to spend the summer with her mother and grandmother. Her father, David, is a lawyer who spends his weekdays working in Boston and only spends the weekends on the island.
At first glance, it would appear that Jessica is the protagonist, but this book is pretty equally divided between Jessica and her sisters and mother, with the mother getting the smallest amount of page time. Each of these women is facing their own battles: Kate is struggling with a guilty conscience over her son's deployment; Blair is unhappy and unfilled in her marriage; Kirby is running from a traumatic experience and trying to figure out who she is; and Jessica will experience her first love and first heartbreak.
This is truly a novel at 418 pages. It's divided in to three parts, although part three is much shorter than the first two. I'm going to try to keep this review as concise as possible, but keep in mind that there are four protagonists in this book, and each one is experiencing a story that is uniquely theirs and that is happening mostly separate from the other three. So be forewarned that this review will be on the longer side out of necessity.
As always, skip to the end of the post to avoid spoilers.
***Spoilers**
Our book begins with a prologue that sets the stage for the tone of the story. Kate, the mother, has just gotten Tiger's Selective Service notice, or draft documents, for the Vietnam War. Tiger, who is just 19 years old, is her only son and arguably Kate's favorite child. She gives him the papers when he comes home from his job at the driver's ed school where he's just met Magee, the girl who will become his girlfriend in the few weeks leading up to his report date and his fiancé by the end of the book.
Kate, for reasons not yet explained, feels as if Tiger being drafted for war is a punishment meant for her. The only clue we get is that it stems from something that happened sixteen years before. I figured out pretty early in the book that it had something to do with her first husband's death, but my original guess was way off the mark.
Desperate to save her son, Kate reaches out to the caretaker of her family's summer home (All's Fair), Bill Crimmins, and asks him to use his connection to a higher up military officer to have Tiger sent home. In exchange, Kate agrees to convince her mother, Exalta a.k.a. Nonny, to allow Bill and his 15-year-old grandson to live in their guest house (Little Fair). It's a hard concession for Kate but a testament to how far she'll go to save her son. We learn who Pick is to Kate a good bit into the book, but for the sake of this summary, I'm going to go ahead and explain.
Pick's mother, Lorraine, worked with her father at All's Fair. She did a myriad of jobs including cook and maid and eventually babysitter for Kate's first three children. Lorraine was four years younger than Kate and someone Kate considered her friend. Then, Kate caught her husband, Wilder, with Lorraine in the buttery (basically a small, dark closet).
Kate immediately packed up herself and the children and left Nantucket early that summer, telling Wilder that this was the last straw. He wasn't a faithful husband, but Kate had been raised on the belief that appearances were more important than actual happiness. So when Wilder returned home a few days later, she didn't turn him away. Then she received word that Lorraine was pregnant with Wilder's child, and this time Kate told him she was contacting a divorce attorney. He shot himself immediately after she left the room.
Because it was a suicide, the insurance company didn't want to pay out, so Kate got a lawyer to prove that Wilder's death was accidental. Kate's guilt over her husband's death lies in the fact that she had not contacted a divorce attorney and did not plan to. She also knew that her husband suffered from depressive episodes and believes that she is the reason he killed himself.
Eventually, Kate marries her attorney, David Levin, despite her mother's disapproval of his Jewish heritage, and they have Jessica (Jessie). This is the first summer in her life that she'll be on Nantucket without any of her other siblings. She's dreading being stuck at All's Fair with just her intimidating Nonny and her distracted mother.
Ever since Tiger was deployed, Kate has been drinking more and more to disconnect from her feelings. This causes all kinds of problems, including an ugly confrontation with one of her oldest acquaintances at a busy restaurant. Her husband, David, tells her she needs to stop drinking and stops coming to the island on the weekends; he works during the week.
Jessie is most directly affected by Kate's new addiction. For most of the summer, it's as if Kate has forgotten that she has another child, leaving Jessie mostly to her own devices.
The summer of 1969 is full of firsts for Jessie. She gets her first period and is fitted for her first bra. She also has her first experience with unwanted attention from a man. It happens at her first tennis lesson at her grandmother's club. She convinces her Nonny to get her a new, female instructor, but doesn't tell her what happened. She eventually finds out that one of her friends has been assigned the same guy as an instructor and that he's being inappropriate with her. She confides in her new instructor who vows to get him fired.
She experiences first love with Pick. She has her first kiss with him, then a few days later he has a girlfriend his own age. Jessie is heartbroken, but by the end of the book their friendship is rekindled. She does learn who Pick is; her mother confides in her about what happened with Wilder, a secret that Jessie chooses to keep.
All throughout most of the book, Jessie is committing petty theft. It started as a game with her friends from back home, but now that she's started, she finds that she can't stop. She's using this as a means of lashing out at all the situations she can't control -- for instance, her tennis instructor, Pick, her absent mother, etc. She steals from the snack desk at the club and takes money and lip gloss out of one of her friend's purses in the locker room. It all comes to a head when her Nonny gifts her a family heirloom: a necklace that her late husband gave her. She tells Jessie that she can wear the necklace on special occasions and that she (Nonny) will keep it safe for her. Jessie sneaks the necklace out of her Nonny's room without asking to wear on a girls night with her mom and loses the necklace. Thankfully, Mr. Crimmins found the necklace and returned it to Nonny. Jessie does eventually confess about the necklace, at which point her Nonny reveals that she knew about that as well as what happened at the club. She makes Jessie return all of the things that she's stolen and grounds her for a week.
Jessie isn't the only grandchild at All's Fair for long. About the same time as her ordeal with the tennis instructor (within the first week), her oldest sister, Blair, is reaching a breaking point in her marriage.
Blair is married to an astrophysicist, Angus, who is working on the 1969 moon launch. She met him through his brother, Joey, whom she was dating at the time. After she and Angus are married, Blair quits her teaching job, which she loved, to keep house. Bored and unhappy, she applies and is accepted to a Harvard master's program, but Angus doesn't allow her to accept. Then she finds out she's pregnant, although it's awhile before they learn that she's having twins.
Angus is brilliant but suffers from episodic depression. He also works too much. So one day Blair decides to visit him at work as a surprise. When she arrives, Angus is out on a personal appointment that she knows nothing about, and the way that the secretary acts plants a suspicion in Blair's mind that he's seeing another woman. This suspicion is further cemented when Angus rushes in with his clothes askew and his hair a mess and all but confirmed when Blair eavesdrops on a phone conversation between Angus and a woman named Trixie, who she believes is a prostitute based solely on her name.
Then one day her brother-in-law and former boyfriend, Joey, surprises her at home while Angus is at work. She confides in him about what she thinks Angus is doing, and Joey takes advantage. Angus comes home unexpectedly to find them kissing on the sofa. He and Joey get into a physical fight, then Angus tells Blair that she should go to Nantucket. She does, which results in Jessie moving into Little Fair with Pick and Mr. Crimmins. She spends pretty much her entire time on the island wallowing.
Unbeknownst to Blair, Angus comes to Nantucket to try to see her, but Kate, in a very unexpectedly modern move, sends him away. He goes to Houston where he remains until after the twins are born, but we'll get to that. On the day that Blair goes into labor, she wakes up feeling the best she's felt in weeks and decides that it's time for her to be a good older sister and take Jessie bra shopping, since their mother clearly isn't in the right state of mind to do so. Her water breaks while Jessie is mid fitting. They attempt to walk back to All's Fair, but the contractions become too much, so Jessie runs home to get her mother and the car.
Blair has the twins, a boy and a girl, on the same day as the moon launch. Eventually Angus comes to Nantucket and explains who Trixie is. Turns out, she's a psychiatrist and has been treating his depression. He and Blair make amends, though not without Angus conceding Blair back some of her freedom, namely in that they'll hire help for the twins so she can get her masters at Harvard.
The third sister, Kirby, returns to All's Fair for the remainder of the summer not long after Blair has the twins. She's spent her summer working on Martha's Vineyard, which is where pretty much the entirety of her story takes place, so we'll have to backtrack quite a bit since Kirby's storyline is happening at the same time as the others, just on a different island.
Kirby is a 21-year-old college student who wants to figure out how to make it on her own. She's involved in the Civil Rights Movement and anti-war protests. She's even been arrested. Twice. That's where she met Scottie, a police officer with whom she had an affair that ended when she became pregnant. When she told him, he gave her some money and left. That's when she figured out he was married.
Kirby did not want the baby, so she goes to a free clinic where a doctor directs her to someone that could help her, despite abortion being illegal at the time. It doesn't come to that, though, as Kirby has a miscarriage soon after.
Not wanting to face her Nonny or her parents, Kirby goes to Martha's Vineyard where she lives in a boarding house for young ladies and gets a job working the overnight shift at a hotel. She meets Darren, a black Harvard student whose mom is a doctor and father is a judge. They start seeing each other, but the relationship is on rocky ground. Darren's mom was the doctor who helped Kirby, so she does not approve, and Darren wants to keep their relationship a secret. Having just suffered heartbreak at the hands of a secret relationship, Kirby breaks things off with him, though she does agree to see him when they both go back to school. At the end of the book (during Thanksgiving), she even tells her Nonny about Darren, admitting that he's black, and Nonny surprises her by being accepting.
Senator Ted Kennedy comes to Martha's Vineyard and has a ball for his brother Bobby's former campaign workers. Kirby goes with her friend Patty from the boardinghouse, whose sister was one of those workers, to this party. She leaves early to go to her shift at the hotel, which is where the senator is staying. Patty's boyfriend, Luke, who Kirby believes is abusive, shows up to the hotel drunk and looking for Patty. Kirby believes that he's going to hurt Patty so she breaks the rules and gets in the cab with him to make sure he goes home. When she gets back to the hotel, the night guard has given Sen. Kennedy his room key.
The next day, they find out that Sen. Kennedy drove his car off a bridge with one of the campaign workers, Mary Jo Kopechne, in it, and she died. The senator managed to free himself from the car and walk to the hotel. When she's questioned about the senator's arrival, Kirby admits that she left her post, and the hotel manager fires her. So she decides to go to Nantucket for the rest of the summer. On the ferry ride over, she sees her ex police officer boyfriend with his pregnant wife and finds some closure.
All throughout the book, Tiger and Jessie have been exchanging letters, but I think only one letter is really worth mentioning. It's the one that Tiger sends to his mother at the end of the summer.-Turns out, Bill's high-up military friend finally managed to pulled some strings to have Tiger transferred to a safer position. It's essentially a desk job, but Tiger refused. This letter made me cry, in a good way
The book ends by fast forwarding to November. The family is returning to Nantucket for Thanksgiving but not at All's Fair. Earlier in the book, David suggested to Kate that their family buy their own home on the island, to get out from under Exalta's thumb. Kate balks at the idea at first, but eventually she buys the home that David found in secret and reveals it to the family at Thanksgiving. Everyone's there, except Tiger, including Nonny and her new beau, Mr. Crimmins, and Tiger's fiancé, Magee.
The final scene of the book is the one and only from Tiger's point of view. He's celebrating Thanksgiving in Vietnam with his company, but he is certain that he will see his family again soon.
***End Spoilers**
Wow! That might just be the longest summary I've written on the blog, but all the separate storylines made it impossible to condense down anymore. I promise this book is worth it, though. It's one of those that I wish I could read again for the first time.
Y'all know that I enjoy a good historical fiction novel, and the summer of 1969 was certainly a hotbed of historical activity. The book only focuses on three specific events -- the moon landing, Ted Kennedy's accident, and the Vietnam War -- but the author manages to weave elements of the women's lib and civil rights movements into this tale so naturally that the story felt incredibly authentic.
The one that I was least familiar with was the senator's accident, so, me being me, I looked it up. It's apparently the most famous car accident in American history; there was even a movie made about it in 2018. One fact that the book gets wrong is that Senator Kennedy did not stay at a hotel that weekend; rather he was staying at a private cottage that he and his cousin had rented. As such, there was no interaction with hotel staff. There are a ton of unanswered questions about this night, which the book doesn't address because it doesn't have any real bearing on the story. Here's what I learned: Kennedy somehow managed to get out of the car, though he's always insisted that he doesn't know how. He says he dove back down to try to rescue Mary Jo, but when he was unsuccessful he went back to the cottage where he called his cousin and another friend. They all three returned to the pond and tried unsuccessfully to rescue her. It was ten hours before anything was reported to the authorities. The fire chief at the time said that Mary Jo survived for a few hours in the car because there was an air pocket; she did not drown but rather suffocated. He believes that if the accident was reported right away, she would have survived. How awful. (source)
So, final thoughts? I'm going to rank this book up there with When We Believed in Mermaids by Barbara O'Neal (my full review), By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult (my number one best book of 2025), The Last of the Moon Girls by Barbara Davis (my full review), and The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods (my full review). The first two books were at the top of my best books list for last year. The last two both made appearances on my mid-year best books list -- cutting them from the final list was such a hard decision!
All that to say that Summer of '69 is a real contender for this year's best book's list. In fact, I've already added it to my best books so far list, which will publish some time next month!
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