Review John Austin (1/15/2026)
Stacy Windahl’s When the Season Ends succeeds with notable ease in immersing the reader in an ordinary life that takes an improbable detour. The characters make up a full and unpredictable menu of plausible ordinaries—but no stereotypes. All these characters’ existential crises get dangerously tangled with the central character’s own crisis, for one tumultuous summer on Mackinac Island. The prose has that breathless I-gotta-write-this-down quality of a precocious high school sophomore, which gives decidedly vigorous life to the middle-aged momwife (Mrs Nash) whose odyssey we are invited to share. I confess I was skeptical at first, but the truth is I couldn’t put it down.
Mrs. Nash has a husband and a college-aged son, both of whom she adores and both of whom must leave their Chicago suburb for the summer, one to manage a high-stakes merger in a faraway city and the other to work at a summer camp in Michigan. Mrs. Nash is thus bereft of her comfortable life and confused about who she is supposed to be now. A series of cosmographic exigencies leads her to Mackinac Island, where she spent a transformative summer waiting tables two decades before. The high-cortisol saga that ensues takes all summer, and when it’s over, everything and everybody are changed. It wouldn’t do to go into details here; I recommend you read the book to find out what happens, how it happens, and to whom it happens.
There are a few good characters who are too good to be true, a few bad moments that are too bad to be true, and a few sudden and impulsive U-turns, which are essential to the plot, of course, but are too sudden and impulsive to be true. That said, I’m not sure it would be possible to tell this story without them, and who am I to say that things can’t turn every which way at once? As Lord Bolingbroke whispered to his dining companion at Versailles, “Small causes can lead to great effects. This war with France sprang from the wounded vanity of a courtesan… I became a cabinet minister because I knew the sarabande, and I lost power because I caught a cold.” The plot of Windahl’s book works something like that; it is powered by misplaced assumptions and wounded vanities, all of which make the story refreshingly accessible. It speaks of, and speaks to, us all.
A word about the setting . Not all readers will have been to Mackinac Island (I have not), but the author’s obvious intimacy with and mature affection for that most precious of destinations means that the reader does not need to bring personal experience of the island to the imbibing of this captivating tale. All one needs to enjoy Stacy Windahl’s When the Season Ends is a golden moment in one’s youth and a thirst for wisdom as one ages. That’s enough.
