That Summer by Jennifer Weiner

I read this for one of the reading badges in a Goodreads challenge--I read incessantly but somehow two of the 12 summer badges did not have a single book that I had either read or was hoping to read, including this one, which was that the book had 'summer' in the title. The book has two Dianas. The first Diana we meet as a teenager where she works as a nanny for well-off family vacationing in Cape Cod. She loves the beach and the ocean and even her job. As the summer progresses she develops a crush on an older boy and when he invites her to a party with all of his friends, she happily accepts. But the boy betrays her and Diana is assaulted, which changes the trajectory of her life forever. The story fast forwards to 2019 and we meet the second Diana, called Daisy, who a stay-at-home housewife who is working on growing her cooking business. She married her husband Hal when she was very young and he 13 years her senior. She is quite financially dependent on him but also beholden to him--she dropped out of college intending to go back but never does. She wanted more children but only has one. She is isolated after the one friend she had that was hers dies. Otherwise he controls her life--what they do socially, where they travel, and what happens with their daughter. Everything changes for Daisy when she starts to receive misdirected emails meant for a woman named Diana Starling, whose email address is just one punctuation mark away from her own. Daisy gets a glimpse into Diana’s glamorous life and she begins to wonder, what if things were different for her? Eventually, the two connect, meet and become friends. But as you can imagine, this connection isn’t accidental. And you probably know exactly where the story is going from there--this is not a book with twists and turns. So that said, I liked but did not love this--it is a good story though, so I would recommend it.