Acknowledgments
Using a real person’s name for a character’s has been a great way to raise money for worthy causes. In this book we raised a tidy sum for the Pink Ribbon Event in Wilmington, North Carolina, thanks to the generosity of Gladys Maritza Vasile, who becomes not one but two characters in these pages—Maritza and Gladdie. I don’t know if she has a husband, but I gave her one; Bob is the fellow’s name and he’s a billionaire. Why not? And Olivia Ritchie from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who made a generous donation to Bishop Kelly High School became a fictional wildly successful interior designer in All Summer Long and a spectacular woman I’d like to know in real life. Roni Larini, Ellen Williams, Anne Fritz, and Dorothy Kreyer, who support the Morris Plains, New Jersey, efforts to stop domestic violence, are the Greek chorus in this story and oh my goodness I think I can attest to the fact that the antics of the fictional Ellen, Anne, and Dorothy bear absolutely no resemblance to the behaviors and attitudes of their namesakes! They are bad girls (sometimes very naughty) in this story but almost saintly in reality. You have to have a little wickedness to make a juicy story. Nicholas Seymour? Ah, Nick. I don’t know you, but I know the Columbia Catholic School thanks you and I married you to my protagonist because I thought you made such a great couple. And last, thanks to Michelle Bemis for supporting the Tiger Woods Foundation. I married you off to fictional Buddy Bemis, who is a plastic surgeon and a great guy. Again, I have met only a few of these folks and only ever so briefly so I can assure you that the behavior, language, proclivities, and personalities of the characters bear no resemblance to the actual people. I hope they get a hoot out of seeing their names all over these pages.
Thanks to David Fletcher, furniture maker of Kendal, England, for your fascinating work, and always to Faye Jenson of the South Carolina Historical Society for her wonderful advice and guidance.
More truth. Jason, Sam, and Elaine Fowler do indeed own Sea Island Builders and they do in fact build gorgeous houses. I hope y’all will all be pleasantly surprised to find yourselves in this drama. It was fun being reminded of you each time I wrote your names!
And Nicole Bousquet, an actual real estate broker on the island of Nantucket, found her way into these pages via the suggestion of Lynn and Steve Glasser. Tony and Martin McKerrow, formerly of Montclair and always of Nantucket, deserve special thanks for their advice about their island’s history and current population. I stumbled onto Nathaniel Philbrick while doing some Nantucket research and thought it might be fun to make him a colleague of my historian character, Nicholas Seymour. Okay, to be honest, I love Philbrick’s work, Mayflower, in particular, and this story gives me the chance to thank him for opening my eyes to what it was really like for our northern founding fathers to settle this country. Okay, I surrender. The Philbricks can buy the Franks a lobster roll some sunny summer day! We’d love to meet y’all.
And make sure when you’re in the Lowcountry that you do stop in for lunch or dinner at The Long Island Café on the Isle of Palms. Say hello to the owner/chef, Ravi Scher, and tell everyone who works there that I sent you. I really love this charming spot and they do indeed serve the best fried shrimp I’ve ever had. While you’re on the Isle of Palms, have dinner at Ken Vedrinski’s Coda del Pesce—best crudo in town!
As always, special thanks to George Zur, who is my computer webmaster, for keeping the website alive. To Ann Del Mastro and my cousin Charles Comar Blanchard, all the Franks love you for too many reasons to enumerate!
I’d like most especially to thank my wonderful editor at William Morrow, Carrie Feron, for her marvelous friendship, her endless wisdom, and her fabulous sense of humor. This is a true story: your ideas and excellent editorial input always make my work better. I couldn’t do this without you. I am blowing you bazillions of smooches from my office window in Montclair.
And to Suzanne Gluck, Alicia Gordon, Clio Seraphim, Claudia Webb, Cathryn Summerhayes, Tracy Fisher, and the whole amazing team of Jedis at WME, I am loving y’all to pieces and looking forward to more of our brilliant future together!
To the entire William Morrow and Avon team: Brian Murray, Michael Morrison, Liate Stehlik, Nicole Fischer, Lynn Grady, Tavia Kowalchuk, Kelly Rudolph, Shawn Nicholls, Frank Albanese, Virginia Stanley, Rachael Brenner Levenberg, Andrea Rosen, Caitlin McCaskey, Josh Marwell, Doug Jones, Carla Parker, Donna Waitkus, Michael Morris, Gabe Barillas, Mumtaz Mustafa, and last but most certainly not ever least, Brian Grogan: thank you one and all for the miracles you perform and for your amazing, generous support. You still make me want to dance. Not shimmy like Maritza Vasile in these pages, but a respectable dance, like a conga line?
To Debbie Zammit, it seems incredible but here we are again! Another year! Another miracle! Another year of keeping me on track, catching my mistakes and making me look reasonably intelligent by giving me tons of excellent ideas about everything. Thank you so much for all you do!
To booksellers across the land, and I mean every single one of you, I one of you, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
To my family, Peter, William, and Victoria, I love y’all with all I’ve got. Victoria, you are the most beautiful, wonderful daughter and I am so proud of you. You and William are so smart and so funny, but then a good sense of humor might have been essential to your survival in this house. And you all give me great advice, a quality that makes me particularly proud. Every woman should have my good fortune with their children. You fill my life with joy. Well, usually. Just kidding. And to Carmine Peluso, who recently joined our family. We love you, son, and we are so proud to claim you! Peter Frank? You are still the man of my dreams, honey. Thirty-three years and they never had a fight. It’s a little incredible to realize it’s only thirty-three years, especially when it feels like I’ve loved you forever.
It doesn’t seem right to close these remarks without a nod to mark the passing on March 4, 2016, of my great friend Pat Conroy. Pat was an incredibly generous man who changed so many people’s lives in positive ways. He was the father you always wanted, the brother you never had, and the confessor you needed when life got out of hand. Like so many others, I loved him. And so many writers would agree that we will miss him every day for the rest of our lives. Rest in peace, you old Bulldog. You were the greatest. (My own father was a Citadel Bulldog, class of 1937.)
Finally, to my readers to whom I owe the greatest debt of all, I am sending you my most sincere and profound thanks for reading my stories, for sending along so many nice emails, for yakking it up with me on Facebook and for coming out to book signings. You are why I try to write a book each year. I hope All Summer Long will entertain you and give you something new to think about. There’s a lot of magic down here in the Lowcountry. Please, come see us and get some for yourself! I love you all and thank you once again.
About the Author
New York Times bestseller Dorothea Benton Frank was born and raised on Sullivans Island, South Carolina. She resides in the New York area with her husband.
Dorothea Benton Frank’s most recent bestseller, All the Single Ladies, debuted at #6 on the New York Times list, where it remained in the top twenty for four weeks. It was also a USA Today bestseller, debuting at number ten.
A contemporary voice of the South in the ranks of Anne Rivers Siddons and Pat Conroy, Dorothea Benton Frank is beloved from coast to coast, thanks to her bestsellers, including The Hurricane Sisters, The Last Original Wife, Porch Lights, Folly Beach, Sullivans Island, and Plantation.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Dorothea Benton Frank
All the Single Ladies
The Hurricane Sisters
The Last Original Wife
Porch Lights
Folly Beach
Lowcountry Summer
Return to Sullivans Island
Bulls Island
The Christmas Pearl
The Land of Mango Sunsets
Full of Grace
Pawleys Island
Sh
em Creek
Isle of Palms
Plantation
Sullivans Island
Credits
Cover design by Laywan Kwan
Photographs © Vincent Ricardel / Getty Images (woman); © Shutterstock (background)
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
all summer long. Copyright © 2016 by Dorothea Benton Frank. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Digital Edition MAY 2016 ISBN: 9780062390776
Print ISBN 978-0-06-239075-2 (hardcover)
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Dorothea Benton Frank, All Summer Long
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