My Readers Guide to The Five Star Weekend (2023) by Elin Hilderbrand is a your read and watch guide to the new adaptation! The Five Star Weekend is a book about female friendship but also a quiet mystery about what we hide from the people we love. The Peacock adaptation streams on July 9, 2026. My Readers Guide has a character list, plot summary and a quiz: which of the Five Star ladies are you?

Table of Contents

• Character List
  • Hollis and Her Circle
  • Nantucket Residents
• Plot Summary for The Five Star Weekend
  • Background
  • Before the Weekend
  • The Weekend Begins
  • The Reveal
  • Resolutions
  • A Year Later
• Quiz: Which Five Star Weekend Character Are You?

Character List

Hollis and Her Circle

• Hollis Shaw: the weekend’s host. A successful food blogger behind “Hungry with Hollis,”
• Matthew Madden: Hollis’s husband, a cardiac surgeon.
• Caroline: their college-aged daughter. Reluctantly films the weekend for her mother’s blog, and is navigating her own complicated summer.
• Gigi Ling: an airline pilot and one of Hollis’s most avid blog readers.
• Tatum McKenzie: Hollis’s childhood best friend from Nantucket. Loyal, down-to-earth, and quietly dealing with a health crisis
• Dru-Ann Jones: Hollis’s college best friend, now an outspoken powerhouse sports agent.
• Brooke Kirtley: a Wellesley mom friend from Hollis’s Boston years.

Nantucket Residents

• Dylan McKenzie: Tatum’s son
• Kyle McKenzie: Tatum’s husband.
• Jack Finigan: Hollis’s first love, still living on the island.
• Electra Undergrove: town gossip, was close friends with Hollis and Tatum. Mad to be uninvited!

Plot Summary for The Five Star Weekend

Background

Hollis Shaw grew up on Nantucket, lost her mother young, and eventually built a food blog that became a brand., When her husband Matthew died suddenly in a car accident, everything changed.

Seven months after Matthew’s death, Hollis reads an article about a widow who gathered one friend from each decade of her life for a healing weekend together. She decides to do the same: Tatum from childhood, Dru-Ann from college, Brooke from her Boston years, and Gigi, her online friend and blog supporter.

Everyone accepts.

Before the Weekend

Each guest is carrying something into the weekend.

• Tatum just had a breast biopsy and is so frightened she can’t bring herself to listen to the voicemail with results.
• Dru-Ann is in crisis after a rant about a client (a golfer who Dru-Ann believed was faking a mental health crisis to follow her boyfriend to a tournament) went viral on social media.
• Brooke’s husband Charlie is a drunk and a serial sexual harasser, and Brooke has been running out of ways to keep that hidden.
• Gigi knows exactly what she’s walking into. But why?

Caroline, Hollis’s daughter, arrives for the summer to find Dylan McKenzie. Tatum’s son, (and someone she has history with) waiting at the airport to pick her up. She has reluctantly agreed to film the weekend for her mother’s blog.

The Weekend Begins

The five women settle into Hollis’s stunning Nantucket house, where their hostess has the entire weekend scheduled out and Instagram-ready.

But old tensions surface quickly. Tatum and Dru-Ann have a long-standing grudge that dates back to Hollis’s wedding, where Dru-Ann co-opted the maid-of-honor role in a way that reminded me of the movie Bridesmaids. Brooke keeps running into Electra Undergrove in town. A sharp-tongued local who used to be Hollis’s closest friend. She hints, more than once, that she saw Matthew with a mystery woman.

Gigi moves through the weekend outwardly composed but inwardly terrified. Meanwhile, Caroline is sneaking off to spend time with Dylan, whose ex (and co-parent) Aubrey shows up at the local bar and throws a drink at her.

In a quieter moment, Tatum sits down for Caroline’s camera and reveals something she’s never told anyone: she deliberately threw their championship softball game senior year because Hollis wanted to cancel their post-graduation plans and go to UNC.

Dru-Ann, meanwhile, gives Brooke a frank and surprisingly tender pep talk about her marriage. Then she gets fired.

The Reveal

At dinner out in town, Electra Undergrove sidles up to the table. She has news: Charlie, Brooke’s husband, has been accused of sexual harassment … again. As almost an aside, she claims she saw Gigi with Matthew in Atlanta.

The next day, on the boat cruise Hollis has planned as the weekend’s centerpiece, the truth finally comes out: Matthew wasn’t headed to a medical conference when he crashed. He was driving to the airport to meet Gigi. And missing Hollis’s annual holiday party.

Hollis drives Gigi back to the house alone where Gigi tells her everything: How it started. That she fell in love with him. But that she isn’t sure he loved her the same way.

And then she drops a detail that reframes the whole story: just before the accident, Matthew called Gigi to end things. He wanted to work on his marriage. Hollis finally reads Matthew accident report and realizes that yes, Matthew was driving back home to Hollis when he crashed.

Resolutions

The women leave changed:

• Hollis gets her weekend, finds closure, and maybe starts a new relationship?
• Dru-Ann is vindicated when her client is exposed
• Tatum finally gets her biopsy results: benign.
• Brooke realizes some important things: her husband is awful AND she’s gay.
• Caroline’s affair with her documentary filmmaker boss ends when his girlfriend finds out.
• Gigi leaves quietly after dropping her bombshell. Was she just assuaging her guilt or would the truth have come out anyway, thanks to that nosy Electra?

A Year Later

Hollis sold the Boston house and moved to Nantucket permanently. It seems like she and Jack could have a future together.

Quiz: Which Five Star Weekend Character Are You?