Before Nantucket Island acquired its current cachet, it was a quiet hometown with a modest influx of summer visitors. Susan Fernald, adopted at birth in 1953 by a wonderful island couple, was raised in a historic summer inn and restaurant during the height of the baby boom. She spent her formative years, carefree and safe, on this small island off the Massachusetts coast, where the winter population hovered around three thousand. She invites you in to remember, or experience for the first time, an idyllic childhood of the 1950s and 1960s, awash with tales of quirky local characters, summer cocktail parties, lobster Newburg, whale-shaped pancakes, and life in a summer resort. She considers herself lucky beyond measure to have been found by the parents who raised her, to have made lifelong friends and to have grown up in the safety and beauty that was, and still is, Nantucket. This tale journeys from her parents' chance meeting in 1939 at a Nantucket summer beach party, through her 1971 high school graduation and the following summer. A bonus chapter reveals the unexpected story of her birth family. Nearly Native is a story that is sure to amuse and delight you.