These Summer Storms Has It All: Dysfunctional Families, Inheritance Games, and Island Romance.

A perfect summer read full of secrets, scandal, romance, and a high-stakes inheritance game — These Summer Storms is bingeable and brilliant.

Synopsis

New York Times bestselling author Sarah MacLean’s first foray into contemporary fiction, with a sharp, sexy novel about a wealthy New England family’s long-overdue reckoning with hidden desires, destructive secrets…and one week that threatens to tear them apart

Alice isn’t like the other Storm siblings. While the rest stayed to battle for their parents’ approval, attention, and untold billions, she left, building her own life beyond the family’s name and influence. Nothing could induce her to come back, except the shocking death of her larger-than-life father. Now back on the family’s private island off the Rhode Island coast, she plans to keep her head down, pay the last of her respects, and leave the minute the funeral is over.

Unfortunately, her father had other plans. The eccentric, manipulative patriarch left his widow and their grown children a final challenge–an inheritance game designed to humiliate, devastate, and unravel the Storm family in ways both petty and life-altering. The rules of the game are clear: stay on the island for one week, complete the tasks, receive the inheritance.

One week on Storm Island is an impossible task for Alice. Every corner of the sprawling old house is bursting dysfunctional chaos: Her older sister’s secret love affair. Her brother’s incessant mansplaining. Her sister-in-law’s unapologetic greed. Her younger sister’s obsession with “vibes”. Her mother’s penchant for stirring up competition between her children. And all under the stern, watchful gaze of Jack Dean, her father’s enigmatic, unfairly good-looking, second-in-command. It will be a miracle if Alice manages to escape the week unscathed.

A story about the transformative power of grief, love, and family, this luscious novel is at once deliciously clever and surprisingly tender, exploring past secrets, present truths, and futures forged in the wake of wild summer storms.

Review

4 solid stars

I want to thank  PRH International for my free book! I had never heard of Sarah Maclean before and learned after finishing my read, to my big surprise, that she usually writes historical fiction!

This is far from an historical fiction yet it’s a very bingeable summer read, perfect to take your mind off work and in holiday mood.

These Summer Storms has all the ingredients to make an excellent recipe:

-genius controlling billionaire patriarch: check;

-inheritance game: check;

-a dysfunctional family gathered to play said game: check;

-family secrets and scandal: check;

-a hot fixer in charge of supervising the game: check;

-some high dose of introspection, groveling and healing: also check;

-and romance, even romances.

The patriarch of the Storm family just died in an accident and his children are called to the family estate on a private island to prepare for the funeral.

Only, the very composed and icy mother doesn’t want to hear about a funeral, just about a celebration. And to get their inheritance, the children learn they will have to stay five days on the island and accomplish some tasks. Even beyond the grave, their father intends to control all of them.

Alice, the middle daughter, was estranged from the family after uncovering some scandalous Storm company behavior. Spurned by her siblings, she doesn’t want to play the game her father designed. Even if Jack, the hot fixer she can’t help but think of has been tasked to oversee everything.

Grace is the oldest and has always been desperate to please her mother. Sam is the only son, very arrogant, spoiled and useless. Emily is the baby in the family, the one who can do no harm.

Thrown together one last time, their reunion felt like a brewing storm with lots of buried secrets, resentment waiting to be voiced, jealousy simmering close to the surface but also, maybe , the will to become better, to become a real family and finally heal.

This has been a very enjoyable read filled with glitter, hidden truths, old wounds and whirlwind romance.

Thanks for reading.

Sophie