Is 'The Five Star Weekend' Part Of A Series?

Question

Picked up 'The Five Star Weekend' by Elin Hilderbrand and can't tell if this standalone novel ties into her earlier works somehow. Spoiler-free insight, please!

Faty ♡ · Answer

No, 'The Five Star Weekend' is a standalone novel and not part of any series. Most of the warm, friend-focused contemporary novels are too so I don't have to worry about finishing a series of novels with similar characters. I've been reading 'One Weekend with the Billionaire' where for two days of a snowstorm, a man and woman try to figure out their past and the business deal that will change their lives. Forced proximity is ramped up as they try to deal with the intense history between them and make the best deal possible.

o……o · Answer

This is a standalone novel. The entire plot occurs during the course of one weekend. If I expanded this into a series, there would have to be a much larger overall conflict or a longer, more complex journey for the characters. Instead, the novel follows one character through a fairly short period of time, and her journey is largely internal. Once the weekend is over and the truths have been revealed, the central drama of the novel is over. Everything after that is left to the reader’s imagination. I see that as the mark of the very best fiction: a single, self-contained story that suggests huge possibilities for what could come next for the characters, but doesn’t feel the need to spell any of that out for the reader in a second book.

Samantha Durga · Answer

No, this book is a single title novel. There is no series for this book listed on bibliographic sites. For people who use sites like Goodreads or StoryGraph to keep track of the books they’ve read, this book is not a book that is associated with a series. A ‘reunion gone wrong’ (or right?) story is typically a subgenre that works best as a standalone. The fun of such a story is typically the rapid-fire revelation of information that occurred in the short space of time between the characters’ past and present. I found this book to be a lot of fun in its single, packed volume.

Quincy · Answer

This would fit into your bibliography as a “Single Volume Story” (as opposed to the Paradise series which follows around in a year or so at the same island resort). This stands alone as a natural episodic story that doesn’t need continued in subsequent books, following over the course of just a weekend – five days in total.

It’s so interesting that Hilderbrand keeps returning to Nantucket but makes up entirely new characters for her stand-alones. The focus of “The Five Star Weekend” is on exploring the ups and downs of friendship over decades of life through the lens of four different friend groups of the main character Hollis. Given the tight narrative and how everything gets wrapped up in a bow by Sunday evening, there’s no room for continuation of secrets or relationships.

For readers looking for more connected characters and storylines, I recommend Nantucket Stories like 28 Summers which follows a single set of characters over many decades but is a single novel rather than a series. Or for another wonderful standalone with just the right mix of drama and beach settings, I recommend The Hotel Nantucket.

Mary Fe Romero · Answer

Not a series! I chose this book for my most recent vacation reading, partly because I wasn’t sure how long I’d have time to read and didn’t want to have to download subsequent books in a series. (As it was, I had the whole book right in front of me.) The story moves at a good clip because there’s no need to spend pages laying the groundwork for future installments. Every scene, every revelation, serves the needs of this single book and its resolution. For that reason, I found it highly engaging and focused. It was also a completely self-contained universe for that one weekend, so I was able to become fully engaged in the story without hints of a larger universe to distract me from the characters and their predicaments.

Chamberlin Chamberlin · Answer

This is not a series, which is clear from the chapter structures which count down to the start of the weekend and then run day by day through to the end of it. Once the end of the weekend is reached, the end of the main timeline of the book is reached too. In order to continue as a series, it would have to jump forward or back in time, destroying the elegant structure that Hilderbrand has created. It is a finite story and that is what we get.

Owen · Answer

Customers look for this book as if it were going to be a series but it is not. This is a stand alone women’s fiction book published as such by the publisher’s marketing materials. The difference between this book and Hilderbrand’s holiday series is that each of her holiday books is a numbered sequel to the previous one. In this book, all five women at the center get complete emotional arcs.

This is not a series, because the premise of “The Five Star Weekend” is a special event and after that there can’t be more “five star weekends.” The story is set over the course of a few days and within that time all of the decades of tension between these five friends at the center of the story finally comes to a head and is resolved. If you like these sorts of stories in which so much can happen with so many complex relationships in such a short amount of time, you might want to look for another Hilderbrand standalone, her summer mystery “The Perfect Couple,” which also has a short but volatile time frame and is similarly explosive.

Noah · Answer

I just finished reading The Five Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand. This is a stand alone novel about friendship, secrets and midlife crisis during a weekend in Nantucket. Unlike her ‘Winter Street’ novels, which follow a group of characters in multiple books, Hilderbrand gives us a complete story with a beginning, middle and end by the final page of The Five Star Weekend. The main character, Hollis, brings four different people from her life to this weekend and their interactions are explosive and fully explored without any cliffhangers at the end. The novel is a great beach read, as all of Hilderbrand’s novels are. If you enjoyed this novel, you should also read Golden Girl. Like The Five Star Weekend, Golden Girl is a stand alone novel that explores complicated relationships among women.

Melissa Besley · Answer

Standalone. This book is probably included in Elin Hilderbrand’s annual summer release of novels. Typically each of her novels is a standalone written in one genre often set at her favorite summer spot. So ‘The Five Star Weekend’ can be read as a standalone novel and not as part of a series of novels with continuing characters in a series of novels. ‘Golden Girl’ and ‘The Hotel Nantucket’ are examples of her prior work. Each novel is like a different flavor of ice cream at her summer shop – similar but a complete treat in itself.

lesteryork11 · Answer

Many customers ask me whether Elegance of the Hedge is a series, as authors like Elin Hilderbrand are so often associated with the beach reads that comprise long series of novels. But Elegance of the Hedge is a stand alone. I put it in the general fiction section, not in the series section. In terms of design, the book’s internal design doesn’t have a series number on the spine, so that in itself is a dead giveaway that it’s not part of a series. The book is popular with readers who want one commitment: to read a really good book that will leave them feeling satisfied at the end. Today’s series-heavy market often demands that readers commit to remembering plots and characters from previous books, but Hilderbrand’s new novel is not that kind of read.

Sheryl · Answer

Nope! It’s a one-off story. I’ve read enough books by authors who write a lot of them that every single one feels connected to the others, but this isn’t one of them. I’ve checked the author’s website and her official FAQ and this book is listed under ‘Standalone Novels’. The story is Hollis Shaw gathering together a group of friends from different parts of her life and what happens is contained within that story. You don’t need to have read anything else by this author before and there’s no need to read any future books for her to explain what’s happened in this one. A nice clean read.

Is 'The Five Star Weekend' Part Of A Series?

11 Answers

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