All the Summers In Between

April 15, 2024
Foster’s clunky latest (following On Gin Lane) sees two friends reconnect after one of them winds up in danger. It’s 1977 and Thea has just celebrated her 30th birthday with friends and family in her hometown of East Hampton, N.Y. After the party, her former friend Margot shows up out of the blue with a vague story about her husband, Willy, a successful restaurateur with Mafia connections, and says she needs to hide out. As the story toggles between past and present, the reader learns more about the summer of 1967, when the women became close friends, but were driven apart following a violent incident they’ve kept secret ever since (the details come out much later). Middle-class Thea dreamed of becoming an illustrator, but gave up those ambitions and devoted herself to her family. Margot, in contrast, was one of the wealthy people who summered in the Hamptons—her father was a renowned morning show anchor, her mother was editor-in-chief of the New York Herald—and she rebelled against her parents by marrying Willy. There’s very little depth to the characterizations, and the descriptions often feel phoned in (“She glowed as if she’d spent the morning at the beach”). In the crowded field of beach reads, this fails to stand out. Agent: Rebecca Scherer, Jane Rotrosen Agency.