Published: July 8, 2025
Format: Audiobook
Length: 13 hours and 17 minutes
Narrator: Julia Whelan
Genre: Women Fiction
Characters: Alice, Jack Dean, Sam, Greta, Emily and Elisabeth
POV: 3rd person, multiple but mostly Alice’s

What’s inside:
⋆✴︎˚｡⋆ family dramas ➺ inheritance games ➺ character-driven stories ➺ rich people problems ➺ coastal Rhode Island setting ➺ found family ➺ sibling chaos ➺ flawed characters ⋆✴︎˚｡⋆

Review

These Summer Storms is a story about how money, power and influence can be used to control and divide people. There are a few twists and turns that are shocking and surprising and a sweet and sizzling romance that I was completely invested in. I really enjoyed this book, in fact, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I was rather underwhelmed at the ending though. I would’ve loved an epilogue to show how everything worked out long-term. Still, the journey was worth it.

🎧 The audiobook was absolutely phenomenal, but of course it’s Julia Whelan. She always does a phenomenal job bringing a unique voice to each and every character.

❝ This family is one bad accident away from a true-crime podcast.❞

❝ Anger and grief get tangled…Sometimes it can be impossible to separate the two. Or differentiate them.❞

Blurb

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.

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