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Overview
It's a hot August Saturday on Nantucket Island. Over the course of the next 24 hours, two lives will be transformed forever.
Marguerite Beale, former chef of culinary hot spot Les Parapluies, has been out of the public eye for over a decade. This all changes with a phone call from Marguerite's goddaughter, Renata Knox.
Marguerite has not seen Renata since the death of Renata's mother, Candace Harris Knox, fourteen years earlier. And now that Renata is on Nantucket visiting the family of her new fiancé, she takes the opportunity, against her father's wishes, to contact Marguerite in hopes of learning the story of her mother's life—and death.
But the events of the day spiral hopelessly out of control for both women, and nothing ends up as planned.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250622877 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/26/2020 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 365,330 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.10(w) x 6.70(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Reading Group Guide
Food for Thought
The Dinner Party
She pulled out her blender and added the ingredients for the pots de crème: eggs, sugar, half a cup of her morning coffee, heavy cream, and eight ounces of melted Scharffen Berger chocolate. What could be easier?
- Marguerite Beale, self-exiled chef in The Love Season
Nantucket author Elin Hilderbrand is making dinner. This is not the Black Angus steak cheeseburgers and Bartlett corn she would normally serve her husband and three children on a steamy summer day. This is a very special dinner—the same dinner her protagonist, Marguerite Beale, makes in Hilderbrand's fifth novel, The Love Season.
A fictitious chef who has given up cooking to punish herself after her best friend's death, Beale crafts the dinner only because her godchild is coming for the first time—to learn more about her dead mother.
Hilderbrand is making the dinner for twelve people who helped inspire the novel, which she originally titled ''The Dinner Party.'' The group is gathering at 5 Quince St., in the circa 1730s home where the novel is set.
At 11:30 a.m., Hilderbrand darts into the fish market to pick up smoked mussels, which she will serve with a homemade aioli. ''In the book, Marguerite smokes the oysters herself, but that's beyond me,'' Hilderbrand says, driving toward Bartlett's Farm to pick up fresh dill, basil, and thyme, along with island-grown tomatoes and zucchini. In the novel, Hilderbrand specifically notes that Marguerite does not go to Bartlett's Farm, but says the farm she does visit is modeled on the local landmark.
Making a novel dinner
Then, it's back to the house Hilderbrand and her family are renting while their own home-just down the street—is being remodeled. Although some of her equipment—like her tart pan—has disappeared into a box marked ''assorted kitchen stuff,'' Hilderbrand is unfazed.
The biggest challenge to making dinner for twelve, she says, is the refrigerator-finding ingredients in it and then finding space for things like the chocolate pots de crème, which need refrigerating until the 7 p.m. dinner. She plops down in front of the open refrigerator, to start rearranging from the bottom shelf up. Reading The Love Season and then watching Hilderbrand make this meal is a little odd—like playing with a set of nesting dolls or strolling through a house of mirrors.
One can see Hilderbrand in Marguerite, in the list each makes to plan the dinner; in the way the author expertly cracks eggs into the blender for pots de crème and uses her own morning coffee; and the fact that she actually says, ''What could be easier?''—unaware she is echoing the words she put in Marguerite's mouth when writing the book sitting on the beach a year ago.
''There's a little bit of me in Marguerite, in how I cook,'' Hilderbrand says.
And, yes, that's her jogging in Morocco, unaware—like her character, Candace Harris Knox—that her blonde hair, baseball cap, and running shorts would draw so much attention in the Muslim country.
"The Love Season's scene in Morocco was a conscious effort on my part to get one of our travels into a book,'' says Hilderbrand, who traveled extensively with her husband, Cliffside Beach Club manager Chip Cunningham, in Southeast Asia before they started a family.
Capturing the island
But The Love Season and Hilderbrand's other novels are also a reflection-and usually a composite-of the people, places, and experiences she encounters living on Nantucket.
Cunningham (a character in his wife's first Nantucket book) says many repeat customers at the hotel he manages look forward to his wife publishing a new novel each season.
''It's part of what they associate with Nantucket,'' he says. ''I'll have Elin come down and sign it for them.''
Hilderbrand sees her books as souvenirs-little pieces of the island visitors can take home with them to evoke the feeling of Nantucket long after they've left.
The Love Season earned a four-star critic's choice rating in June from People magazine reviewer Sue Corbett, who wrote, ''Hilderbrand, who wrote 2002's Nantucket Nights, serves up a mouth-watering menu, keeps the Veuve Clicquot flowing and tops it all with a dollop of mystery that will have even drowsy sunbathers turning pages until the very satisfying end.''
Hilderbrand honed her writing skills at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. Her cooking got its polish from taking lessons with cookbook author and former Que Sera Sarah owner, Sarah Leah Chase, one of the guests she has invited to this dinner. Hilderbrand explains how she decided to write a couple of novels (The Love Season and The Blue Bistro) based specifically on Nantucket's food scene: ''I did the hotel books, and a restaurant owner came up and said to me, 'You could never write about a restaurant. It would be too scandalous.' I thought, 'Aha, then I have to write it.' ''
She prepped by reading copiously, from Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential to Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires. She redoubled her usual food magazine reading of publications like Gourmet, Bon Appetit, and Food & Wine.
''Rarely do I come across something on a menu that I don't know what it is,'' says Hilderbrand, who eats out frequently with her husband.
Foodie stories
To further give her books a sense of behind-the-scenes restaurant work, Hilderbrand volunteered to work at Nantucket's well-known 21 Federal restaurant during Christmas Stroll one year. They told her she could pour water, then demoted her to the coat room, saying they were afraid she would spill the water. But she interviewed chefs, bartenders, and waiters, soaking in details—like the banter among kitchen workers—which she re-creates in the conversation between brothers who work in the kitchen of The Blue Bistro.
Jane Silva, former owner of the Galley at Cliffside Beach Club (the model for The Blue Bistro), is one of several muses Hilderbrand invited to this re-creation of The Love Season dinner. Silva spent hours telling Hilderbrand stories about The Opera House, a now-closed, glamorous restaurant where the island's artists gathered and Silva once saw Judy Garland sitting on the piano to sing. Silva says that The Opera House chef, the late Lucien Van Vyve, was her mentor and friend, who often hosted elaborate dinner parties, with hand-painted menus, at his home in the off-season.
Now a T-shirt and souvenir shop, The Opera House is the model for Marguerite's restaurant, Les Parapluies, which, in the book, drew ardent fans willing to eat whatever chef Marguerite felt like having on the prix fixe menu that night.
''It wasn't so much a reflection of The Opera House as it was that she captured the mood of those grand old restaurants,'' Silva says, sitting on the terrace at 5 Quince St.
Dining with friends
On the night of the dinner party, it is quickly apparent that the dining room of the 275-year-old house was not built to accommodate a dozen. Since her book focuses strongly on female friendship, Hilderbrand asks the guys if they would mind sitting in the kitchen. After some good-natured ribbing about being relegated to the kids' table, they cordially agree.
But first, Hilderbrand says raising her glass: ''All of you were important to me while I was writing this book, and that's why we're here. A toast to all of you!''
Dusk is falling hard outside the dining room's bay window as the women sit down to feast on dinner and conversation. Someone asks Wendy Hudson how things are going at the bookstore she owns downtown; someone else asks about when a neighbor will be back on island. As wineglasses are refilled, there's talk about how local produce compares to hothouse; and about the stifling hot weather, which has caused Hilderbrand's homemade baguettes to rise beyond the edges of the pan and form tasty globs of bread.
But quickly, conversations around the table shift to more personal topics: how couples met, children, grandchildren, and friendships. In the wash of words, in the candlelit dining room, it is easy to see these island ties; to imagine Marguerite Beale and her godchild, Renata Harris, in this place, resurrecting secrets of past and present.
By Gwenn Friss, Food Editor
Excerpted from Cape Cod Times © 2006
1. What is the love season? Is it a place in time? An environment? A feeling? Take a moment to discuss the meaning of the title.
2. A show of hands: Who has been to the island of Nantucket? How is it similar or different than portrayed in The Love Season? Others: Does this book make you want to go there for a visit?
3. The action in The Love Season centers around two elaborate meals: the one Marguerite prepares for Renata, and the dinner party at the Driscoll's. What is the significance of food—how it's prepared, served, and appreciated—in The Love Season? Discuss the dynamics, and politics, of the dining table.
4. In what ways is reading a good novel like eating a good meal? Are readers ever truly satisfied at "The End"? Or are they always left hungry for more?
5. What are the themes of hunger and nourishment that resonate throughout Marguerite's life? And in this novel?
6. Renata believed that Marguerite was like a shipwreck—she had, somewhere within her hull, a treasure trove of information about Candace. Do you think, in the end, that Renata found the answers she was looking for? Can one individual ever reveal the "truth" about another's life? How is it possible to discover someone's essence after death?
7. Talk about the characters' lives off the island of Nantucket—in Paris, Morocco, and New York City. What did these outside locations reveal about the inner lives of Marguerite, Candace, and Renata respectively?
8. During a moment of romantic desperation, the younger Marguerite had asked herself: Did love fall into categories, or was it a continuum? Were there right ways to love and wrong ways, or was there just love and its object? How might the more "modern" Renata answer these questions? How would you?
9. Discuss the symbolism of Renoir's Les Parapluies painting as it's represented and referenced in the book. (You may wish to have a reproduction of it on hand during your meeting as well.)
10. Marguerite, during her early visits with Porter, played a game called "One Word." What word would each member of your group use to describe The Love Season?
