She falls in love with the upper-crust Darren but sleeps with other men as she confronts her own prejudices and assumptions about his blackness and his parent’s disapproval of their interactions. College-attending Katherine – Kirby – is in constant rebellion against her parents and takes a job on Martha’s Vineyard as a desk clerk at a motel, trying to live independently from her family while participating in the burgeoning civil rights movement. Yearning for the Harvard admission that waits for her – her husband’s brother, Joey – pregnant Blair tries to figure out which brother she loves while waiting for her twins to be delivered. Educated Blair, married to a clinically depressed MIT professor, runs home to Nantucket when she learns of her husband’s apparent infidelity. She experiences sexual harassment at the hands of her tennis instructor and falls in first love with a boy named Pick whose mother has abandoned him for the hippie life and whose grandfather, Bill, has military connections that Kate relies upon for word of her brother, Richard.Įach of the other siblings check in in their own way. Jessie has no idea how to cope with her loneliness far from her peer group and stuck with her aging grandmother and unable to fit into the country club set, she starts to steal. Usually, the upper-middle-class Foley-Levins gather at their grandmother Exalta Nicols’ historic home in downtown Nantucket for the summer, but this year they’re spread out across the world and only thirteen-year-old Jessie accompanies her worried mother Kate to her antisemitic and snobby grandmother’s home while her father stays at home in Brookline to work during the week.
Each of them has their own troubled reasons for avoiding the habitually cozy family nest in that banner year – and each of them will go through intense change over the summer in their own way. Through the eyes of the four Foley-Levin siblings, Elin Hilderbrand fumblingly explores this era of change and tumult in her novel, Summer of ’69. Soon the Manson murders and Altamont will collide and kill off an entire generation’s dream of a peaceful, equable utopia. Within the space of four months, a man would walk on the moon, Woodstock would take place, Ted Kennedy’s car would plunge into the waters of Chappaquiddick, and the Vietnam War would reach its fraught peak. This summer marks the fiftieth anniversary of that momentous other summer – the one that took place in 1969.
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