NEW YORK – Mary Parker is a nurse from St. Louis so caught up in the beach novels of Elin Hilderbrand that she makes an annual trip to Nantucket, the Massachusetts island community where Hilderbrand sets her stories.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Parker isn't sure she'll make it to Nantucket this year or even find herself close to a beach.
But she will continue to make the journey in her mind, through books by Hilderbrand and others. “We don't have anything that compares to a place like Nantucket where I'm from," Parker says. “So writers like Elin Hilderbrand are all we have now if those are the kinds of places you dream of being.