I am walking into a Gramercy apartment with a man not my husband, on New Year’s Eve. Champagne still courses illegally through my veins, and my dress glitters beneath my mink coat. [p. 196]
In 1931 Lily and her best friend Budgie go to a football match and meet Graham Pendleton and Nick Greenwald. All come from wealthy New England families, and move in the same circles. Budgie and Graham pair up, Lily and Nick pair up: all is idyllic, though Budgie warns Lily that Nick will never be fully accepted, as he's a Jew.
Fast-forward to 1938, when Lily -- hoping to enjoy a summer by the sea with her aunt, her mother and little Kiki, who's six -- encounters Budgie and Nick again. Her former best friend and former fiance are now married to one another, and Lily has to put on a brave face for Kiki, and for all the people who've known her since childhood. Graham, Budgie's ex, is on the scene too, and Lily finds herself the target of his attentions.
The narrative switches back and forth between the two periods. 1931 Lily is 21, glamorous, innocent: 1938 Lily lives quietly, with Kiki as the centre of her life. She doesn't know about the rumours, and nobody seems willing to tell her the truth ...
Some great characters (though not the protagonists: Lily is dangerously naive, Budgie is a sociopath) and a lovely sense of time and place, but it doesn't quite add up to a good novel. I'm perplexed by Lily's memories of the time when her father was away at war -- must've been WW1, in which case she was eight years old when he came home with permanent damage, yet she'd already taken over firing a signal cannon? And the title, which refers to the hurricane at the climax of the book -- 'New England hurricanes of that magnitude [are called] hundred-year storms, because the probability of such a disaster occurring in any one year is roughly 1 percent. We had not yet seen a hundred summers since the hurricane of 1938...' [author's afterword, p. 355] -- but has no meaning for the characters, and no relevance to the events of the novel.
Just desserts all round, after a plethora of lies and sordid behaviour (including date rape, adultery, sexual abuse...): I liked the atmosphere and setting, but not the plot.
For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 03 SEP 2016, prompt 'beautiful cover'. It's a cover I want to live in: not enough beach time this summer!
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