Matchmaker (Hilderbrand)

The Matchmaker 
Elin Hilderbrand, 2014
Little, Brown & Co.
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316099691


Summary
A woman sets out to find love for those closest to her—before it's too late.

48-year-old Nantucketer Dabney Kimball Beech has always had a gift for matchmaking. Some call her ability mystical, while others—like her husband, celebrated economist John Boxmiller Beech, and her daughter, Agnes, who is clearly engaged to the wrong man—call it meddlesome.

But there's no arguing with her results: With 42 happy couples to her credit and all of them still together, Dabney has never been wrong about romance.

Never, that is, except in the case of herself and Clendenin Hughes, the green-eyed boy who took her heart with him long ago when he left the island to pursue his dream of becoming a journalist. Now, after spending 27 years on the other side of the world, Clen is back on Nantucket, and Dabney has never felt so confused, or so alive.

But when tragedy threatens her own second chance, Dabney must face the choices she's made and share painful secrets with her family. Determined to make use of her gift before it's too late, she sets out to find perfect matches for those she loves most. The Matchmaker is a heartbreaking story about losing and finding love, even as you're running out of time. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth— Birth—ca. 1969-70
• Rasied—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
A loving portrait of an island....It's like renting a cottage on Nantucket for the weekend—breezy and sad when you come to the end.
Washington Post


Hilderbrand's charming, poignant 13th novel chronicles what happens after a woman's true love returns to her 27 years.... Hilderbrand's narrative is thoroughly readable, with likable heroes and believably despicable antagonists. One misstep is the downer ending; though you see it coming, it still feels like it belongs in another book. Despite this, Hilderbrand's story is an engaging read
Publishers Weekly


Hilderbrand's essentially sunny setup, bolstered by many summer parties and picnics...takes a sudden, somber turn. Hilderbrand has a way of transcending the formulaic and tapping directly into the emotional jugular. Class is often an undercurrent in her work, but in this comedy of manners-turned-cautionary tale, luck establishes its own dubious meritocracy. Beach reading with an unsettling edge.
Kirkus Reviews

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