Elin Hilderbrand has spent two decades turning Nantucket into a kind of literary shorthand for beautiful people quietly falling apart, and “The Five-Star Weekend” — first published in 2023 and newly back on bestseller lists as its screen adaptation reaches audiences — is one of her most emotionally ambitious entries into that world.
The novel follows Hollis Shaw, a food blogger whose husband is killed in a sudden accident, and who responds to her grief by inviting one close friend from each chapter of her life — a childhood friend, a college roommate, a work colleague, and Gigi, a friend she’s made only recently and mostly online — to her Nantucket home for what she calls a “Five-Star Weekend.” The women haven’t all been in a room together in years, and Hilderbrand uses the gathering to peel back each relationship’s history, revealing secrets, old resentments, and the ways grief distorts who we decide to lean on.
Hilderbrand’s real subject here isn’t the weekend itself but the architecture of female friendship at different life stages, and the novel is at its best when it’s interrogating what these women actually owe each other versus what nostalgia tells them they owe. A subplot involving Dru-Ann, a successful sports agent whose career nearly implodes after a private conversation is secretly filmed and posted online, gives the book an unexpectedly sharp commentary on cancel culture and the internet’s appetite for stripping context from a single moment. The Nantucket setting, as always in Hilderbrand’s work, functions almost as its own character — sun-drenched and specific enough that the island itself becomes part of the emotional texture.
Response to the novel has been mixed-to-positive: readers and critics have generally praised its emotional ambition and the way it uses grief as an entry point into questions about who belongs in our lives and why, with the Dru-Ann storyline singled out repeatedly as the book’s most surprising and timely thread. The most common critique has been pacing — several reviewers noted that the novel moves briskly through some of its heaviest emotional turns while lingering at length on domestic and social detail, which can make certain relationship payoffs feel rushed relative to the setup they were given. The recent adaptation has renewed that conversation, with some viewers and readers comparing how faithfully the screen version handles that same balance.
“The Five-Star Weekend” is a beach read with real teeth — funnier and sharper about modern friendship and internet culture than its sun-soaked packaging suggests, even if its pacing doesn’t always match its ambitions. For readers drawn back in by the adaptation or simply looking for Hilderbrand at her most emotionally layered, it holds up.
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