The Summer Place

In Weiner's summery story, a family is thrown into turmoil when the 22-year-old daughter announces her engagement to her pandemic boyfriend. This is happy news, but the anxiety-provoking ramifications extend further than anyone could have dreamed. Weiner says she was aiming for something between a Noël Coward farce and A Midsummer Night's Dream, where circumstances beyond human control alter the destinies of every character. I like seeing how an author puts her story together, and my inner literary nerd thoroughly enjoyed parsing how Weiner neatly shuffled oodles of backstory into her unfolding narrative, packing loads of family history into a compact frame. I'd intended to read this in print ... and then I saw that Sutton Foster reads the audiobook. (She was great, of course.)