A WEEKEND ON ALLYSON ISLAND

Five women gather for a birthday celebration at a waterside Georgia estate.

After her husband Jeffrey’s unexpected early death, Moira Allyson turned to alcohol to numb her pain. And when she decided to throw herself a 50th birthday weekend, only four women accepted her invitation: Erin Pepperell, her housekeeper and a single mother; Nell Rehman, a married Southern Baptist with two children; Gemma Gardner, a married realtor with one child; and Celia Kate Stokes, a married homeschooling mother of three. As the five women share the events of the luxury weekend, the pain of their past and current lives comes up. Erin left an abusive marriage and can barely make ends meet; Nell is a recovering alcoholic who leans very heavily on God and her faith; Gemma is a large, self-deprecating woman with a husband who verbally insults her size at every moment; and CK is riddled with anxiety about her children. Nell is confident—and tiresomely repetitive—that prayer, leaning on God, and quoting scripture is what it takes to lead every woman into the light, as she feels it has done for her. (The light being a relationship with God, near-constant prayer, and church attendance.) This is a story of five women getting to know one another and each other’s struggles. It is heavily interspersed with Bible verses and lengthy speeches from Nell that preach her version of Christianity and salvation. And though the story has a similar premise as Elin Hilderbrand’s The Five Star Weekend (2023)—a birthday weekend and deepening female friendships—it lacks the empathy, humor, and warmth of that volume.

A religious novel that advocates a single type of faith for all.