What “The Five-Star Weekend” Gets Right — and What It Skips Past Entirely

A Widow Life® review

I picked up Elin Hilderbrand’s The Five-Star Weekend the way I read most fiction about widowhood now — half as a reader, half as an advocate with a highlighter in her hand. It’s a book (and now a Peacock Premium + series, starring Jennifer Garner) about Hollis Shaw, a food blogger whose husband dies in a car accident after an argument, who then gathers one friend from every era of her life — childhood, college, motherhood, midlife — for a healing weekend on Nantucket.

It’s a beach read. It knows it’s a beach read. And within that lane, it does some things worth naming honestly.

What it gets right

The instinct to gather witnesses is real. Hollis doesn’t want advice or casseroles — she wants people who knew her across decades, who can hold different pieces of who she was before loss narrowed everything down to “w…