Beautiful Day (Hilderbrand)

Beautiful Day 
Elin Hilderbrand, 2013
Reagan Arthur Books
404 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316099769


Summary
The Carmichaels and the Grahams have gathered on Nantucket for a wedding. Plans are being made according to the wishes of the bride's late mother, who left behind The Notebook: specific instructions for every detail of her youngest daughter's future nuptials.

Everything should be falling into place for the beautiful event—but in reality, things are far from perfect.

While the couple-to-be are quite happy, their loved ones find their own lives crumbling. In the days leading up to the wedding, love will be questioned, scandals will arise, and hearts will be broken and healed.

Elin Hilderbrand takes readers on a touching journey in Beautiful Day—into the heart of marriage, what it means to be faithful, and how we choose to honor our commitments. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969-70
• Raised—Collegeville, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Hopkins University; University of Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Currently—lives in Nantucket, Massachuestts

Elin Hilderbrand is an American writer of Summer beach read romance novels, some 20 in all. Her books have been set on and around Nantucket Island where she lives with her husband and three children.

Hilderbrand was born and raised in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. As a child, she spent summers on Cape Cod, "playing touch football at low tide, collecting sea glass, digging pools for hermit crabs, swimming out to the wooden raft off shore," until her father died in a plane crash when she was sixteen. She spent the next summer working—doing piecework in a factory that made Halloween costumes; she promised herself that the goal for the rest of her life would be that she would always have a real summer.

She graduated from Johns Hopkins University and became a teaching/writing fellow at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1993 she moved to Nantucket, took a job as "the classified ads girl" at a local paper, and later started writing.

Her first novels were published by St. Martin's Press. With A Summer Affair, published in 2008, she moved to Little, Brown and Company. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/11/2013.)

Book Reviews
[P]erfect beach read—down to its Nantucket setting. The Carmichaels and Grahams arrive on the island for the wedding of golden girl Jenna Carmichael to ethical banker Stuart Graham. Jenna's mother Beth, before dying seven years ago, prepared a wedding notebook, a guide that approaches sanctity.... The narrative unfolds through [various] perspectives and is aided by entries from Beth's notebook.... The author's straightforward style pulls the reader into the minds of her characters, and all the secrets and sorrows that create the universal messi-ness of major family events.
Publishers Weekly


Ah, the wedding day. A romantic time that celebrates the union of two individuals and the joining of two families. What could be better, right? Wrong! The Jennifer Carmichael/Stuart Graham wedding is full of dysfunction, stress, and the reopening of old wounds.... [A] twist on what seems at first to be a predictable plot point gives this title broad appeal to both young and older women. Another summer delight for fans of women's fiction. —Amber McKee, Cumberland Univ. Lib., Lebanon, TN
Library Journal


Hilderbrand's surprisingly original take on the wedding disaster novel. A wedding weekend is a time-honored literary pretext for exploring family dysfunction, and Hilderbrand's version combines gentle irony with astute observation. .... The populous cast makes establishing a coherent throughline difficult, and the first 200 pages are mainly prologue. But Hilderbrand's casually tossed-off zingers, and her gift for eliciting sympathy for even the most insufferable of her characters, keep the pages turning until the disaster unfolds in earnest.
Kirkus Reviews

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