Name: Nantucket Blue
ISBN: 9781423160519

Leila Howland

Seventeen-year-old Cricket Thompson is planning on spending a romantic summer on Nantucket Island near her long time crush, Jay--but the death of her best friend's mother, and her own sudden intense attraction to her friend's brother Zach are making this summer complicated.

Nantucket Blue

Jess

Read this review on my blog! --&gt; <a href="http://gonewiththewords.com/2013/10/review-nantucket-blue-by-leila-howland.html" rel="nofollow noopener">Nantucket Blue by Leila Howland</a> First, yes, I am in fact posting a review for this OBVS Summer book in October. Sorry, not sorry. :D So I found myself nonstop thinking about Nantucket Blue after I started reading it. It only took me a couple of days to get through it, but I wanted to be reading it at every moment I wasn’t able to...kind of like how Cricket feels about her Secret Lover. :) The story started out really sad, and I could relate to Cricket in her feeling of helplessness. I still feel that way in those types of situations and I’m an adult! Everything Cricket does is out of the goodness in her. She’s just a really good person, even when she’s frustrated with her own family. So it did hurt and anger me to see her being treated badly by her best friend. But at the same time, I got why Jules was acting that way toward her, even though she was going about it all wrong. While in the beginning Cricket is obsessed with FINALLY making Jay her beau, I actually took an instant shine to Secret Lover. How could I not?! And of course the age difference didn’t bother me personally, you know, since I’m currently in an almost ten year relationship with a guy five years younger than me and all. ;) So while I loved them together, it did feel like their blossoming relationship was so fragile, even with the strong emotions between them, because of everything happening to both of them. I was really rooting for them, and while the ending is a happy one, I made the mistake of reading the synopsis of the sequel, Nantucket Red, and WTF?! I totally shouldn’t have because now I’m upset! :((( Now, the setting. Oh, freaking wow, it sounds amazing on Nantucket!! I so want to visit this place one day! Leila Howland did a great job at painting this place for us who have never been there. Nantucket Blue is not only about finding first love, but also about losing people you love and learning to live a life without them, because as it turns out, life does go on regardless. I really loved this book and I cannot wait to read more from Leila Howland.

Jeannette Ordas

A fun, quick read about summer romances and how friendships can change with a bit of mean girl venom thrown in for good measure. 3.5 likable stars.

Cindy Lee

More of my reviews at Secrets of Lost Words.

Rating: C

Nantucket Blue is a story of a girl who is going on summer vacation. She was planning on going to Nantucket with her friend Jules until Jules' mom died. Jules then went cold on her and turned out to be a completely different person.

Cricket as a character was great. She was easy to relate to and we read about her adventure of growing into her own person. I think she really found out who she was on her trip at Nantucket and that summer definitely changed her life. She found out her idea of love and actual love was different as she chose between her dream guy (Jay) and her new kinda-boyfriend (Zack). I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Cricket and all her life-changing decisions.

But I found the book was a bit boring at times and didn't completely keep my interest. Jules also pissed me off. She was supposed to be mean and she was but I don't get how a person can turn around so completely. Isn't it when a loved one dies that you need your family and friends to lean on? Jules explained why she was being so mean in the end but it seemed like such a flimsy explanation. I also didn't find much of a big point in this story. I've read lots of good reviews that said they felt this book talked about the meaning of family and love, etc. But, I didn't. I just.. didn't, okay?

Nantucket Blue was a bit of a disappointment as I've been anticipating this for a long time. It's a great contemporary to pass your time with and a great summer read.

Lisa Collins

I hate to say it, but I was a little disappointed by Nantucket Blue by Leila Howland. I wanted to love it because so many people I follow said it was “so, so, so” good, but it was lacking in a few ways for me. I didn’t hate it though, so that’s an upside. In fact, I thought it was very interesting and worth the read.

I suppose my disappointment stems from the fact there was a lot of unharnessed potential. Things moved very quickly in Nantucket Blue (not usually a bad thing) and a lot of the time that meant things weren’t fully explained. Several times I was reading and the main character, Cricket, would come to a conclusion without fully explaining it to the reader. *mild spoiler I mean, just because a guy likes to go shopping doesn’t mean he is gay. Please give me something other than that to support your theory. You know? *end spoiler It’s not just the character, though. Throughout the entire story it seemed like the events of the book were being told to the audience but never really detailed or explained. It was almost as if Howland was afraid of over-describing things and therefore didn’t describe enough. I don’t like to linger on technicalities when I’m writing a review, but I felt in this particular instance it was important to my point. Like I said: Nantucket Blue had so much potential. A lot of it was harnessed… a lot of it wasn’t.

When we get down to characters I have to admit I wasn’t too thrilled about Cricket. There wasn’t anything about her I found particularly interesting. I don’t think she even grew very much throughout the story. She’s basically over-the-top naive. Her “best friend” was treating her like shit and she kept blaming herself for it, she put way too much weight on someone else making her happy, and she was just sort of slow. Not stupid, but slow to catch on to things. Oh, and she was 18 and didn’t have any idea what horniness was? *mild spoiler I have a sore spot with that fact because it’s terribly inconsistent. She knew what her mother meant by having to “wring out” her underwear but she doesn’t know what horniness is or feels like? I find that hard to believe. *end spoiler I guess Cricket’s naivety is what I disliked most about her. She was so devoid of self-respect and it wasn’t even marked as an issue in the novel. It wasn’t touched on at all.

I was okay with Zack, was whatever about Cricket, and hated Jules… but the characters I really liked were secondary. Liz, Gavin, and George from the Inn Cricket worked at on Nantucket were wonderful. Obviously they all have their own things going on, but if anyone helped to thrust the plot forward (and help Cricket) it was them. All three of the characters were rather quirky and had faults of their own, but they were by far the most likable characters in the entire novel. I would love to see more of them.

As you can see I’m rather torn over Nantucket Blue. It’s a very character driven novel, but I unfortunately found the main characters sort of… bland. (“Bland” isn’t quite the word I was going for, but I can’t think of a way to describe what I mean. Sooorry.) Other than that, though, there was very little that turned me off from the book. I enjoyed everything I read and finished it in just a couple days’ time.

"At that moment it seemed that all our feelings were shimmering above us, around us, in a new and stunning constellation."


I had read so many great things about this book, I was certain I would like it, but I didn't realize just how much. I loved Cricket! I loved Zack! Cricket, especially, was such a well-developed character. The side characters were also very complex... some more than others. This book wasn't quite as light and fluffy as I thought it would be and I'm glad that it wasn't. It was a little meatier than I thought I wanted, but it ended up being exactly what I needed in the end. 

Leila Howland hits it out of the park with her debut book. I look forward to many more fantastic books from her.

Nantucket Blue

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