Done well, a ‘beachy’ book can be perfect summer reading
BY TERESA BUDASI Books Editor/tbudasi@suntimes.com June 24, 2011 6:36PM
Books whose stories take place around a "beachy" locale can make for some of the best summer reading.
SILVER GIRL
By Elin Hilderbrand
Reagan Arthur, 416 pages, $26.99
Beachy locale: Nantucket
Runaway story line: Meredith Delinn is humiliated and loses everything after her husband is caught having cheated rich investors out of billions. Her erstwhile BFF Connie — whose beloved husband died two years earlier —whisks her away to her gorgeous island home to escape the paparazzi and find some peace.
Mystery, conflict, quest or romantic entanglement: Both women are estranged from their adult children, and Connie’s brother Toby — Meredith’s long-ago high school boyfriend — shows up.
THE SUMMER WE CAME TO LIFE
By Deborah Cloyed
Mira, 320 pages, $14.95
Beachy locale: Honduras
Runaway story line: Childhood friends — Samantha, Isabel and Kendra — get together for their yearly vacation,
minus the fourth, Mina, who died of
cancer six months before.
Mystery, conflict, quest or romantic entanglement: Samantha tries to channel the spirit of her lost friend in order to find direction in her own life.
ONE SUMMER
By David Baldacci
Grand Central, 335 pages, $25.99
Beachy locale: South Carolina
Runaway story line: Terminally ill dad Jack rallies after the unexpected death of his wife and moves their children to the seaside home in which she grew up.
Mystery, conflict, quest or romantic entanglement: A courtroom drama ensues — for Baldacci fans looking for legal action — when Jack’s mother-in-law sues for custody of the kids.
MAINE
By J. Courtney Sullivan
Knopf, 388 pages, $25.95
Beachy locale: Cape Neddick, Maine
Runaway story line: The Kelleher family has been coming to Maine for 60 years, and four of the women — the matriarch, her daughter, granddaughter and
daughter-in-law — are the focus among the chaos that defines a family vacation.
Mystery, conflict, quest or romantic entanglement: Each woman has some extra baggage: a secret pregnancy, long-held resentments, domestic frustrations and long-ago mistakes.
SUMMER RENTAL
By Mary Kay Andrews
St. Martin’s, 416 pages, $25.99
Beachy locale: Outer Banks, North Carolina
Runaway story line: Thirtysomethings
Ellis, Julia and Dorie — BFFs since
girlhood — are all at crossroads in their lives and decide to spend a month together in an old beach house.
Mystery, conflict, quest or romantic entanglement: Ellis is attracted to the mysterious landlord; Julia is too insecure to accept her boyfriend’s love; Dorie has been betrayed by the man she loved and trusted.
FOLLY BEACH
By Dorothea Benton Frank
Wm. Morrow, 358 pages, $25.99
Beachy locale: Folly Beach, South Carolina
Runaway story line: Cate Cooper returns to the land of her childhood when, after the death of her husband, she finds herself broke and homeless. She settles in with her aunt at the Porgy House, where Dorothy and DuBose Heyward collaborated with George Gershwin on “Porgy and Bess.”
Mystery, conflict, quest or romantic entanglement: Cate falls for the town’s most eligible bachelor.
Article Extras
Updated: June 26, 2011 2:23AM
Most summer reading roundups are chock-full of thrillers, with a smattering of biography, history and other assorted nonfiction. So I decided to go a bit more literal this year and offer up a list of “beachy” books — books that take place on or around the beach.
Beachy books are the Lifetime movies of the literary world: A person is at a crossroads in life and goes away or “back home” — almost always to a quaint town in a scenic, waterfront location — to clear his/her head only to figure out life’s simplicities are what it’s all about. Many would dismiss these stories as fluffy and formulaic. Only the latter is true. To dismiss as fluff is to under-appreciate the writing, which is, more often than not, thoughtful, fluid and lyrical.
In her debut novel, South of Superior (Riverhead, $25.95), Ellen Airgood conveys the exact feeling you want when running away from your problems: “Lake Michigan crashed on shore
to her right, acting wilder than it did in Chicago. She rolled down her window and sucked in the blustery air,
and a shot a glee coursed through her.”
And there’s a reason for the formulaic nature of these books: It works. The Formula is the draw of such escapist fare. If you’ve never had a
runaway fantasy, you haven’t lived through a recession — or any other life-altering situation for that matter. South of Superior follows the beachy formula to a T:
Beachy locale: Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
Runaway story line: Thirtysomething artist/waitress Madeline Stone lives in Chicago, has suffered a great loss and decides to break off her engagement and move north — temporarily — both as a favor to someone and out of curiosity about the place she was born.
Mystery, conflict, quest or romantic entanglement: An accident forces Madeline to take on an unexpected responsibility, which keeps her in town a little longer than she had planned.
The above outline breaks it down, but of course much more goes on. It’s nothing particularly exciting like a bank heist, a kidnapping or a murder. It’s the people of the place Airgood has created — characters with names like Emil, Arbutus and Mary Feather, strong-willed and hardy folks who can withstand brutal storms as well as small-town gossip; folks who are intensely private but who deep down consider their neighbors as family.
Books like South of Superior make you wonder why anyone gets into the rat race of big-city life. The author has been living the runaway fantasy for 20 years, so she knows a little of what she writes. About 20 years ago, she was camping in the UP, went to a diner and fell in love with the guy who made her sandwich. They married and have been running the diner ever since. She gets to the essence of the appeal of a simpler life as her heroine watches a woman weave baskets:
“The woman lingered in Madeline’s mind. She was making art, of course that had caught her attention, but it was something else too. The innocence of it, maybe, the lack of expectation. She was so engrossed in her work, seemed satisfied to be where she was. The basket might sell for twenty dollars, or it might not. The shop never seemed busy and the things in it weren’t sophisticated. The basket would never make her famous or end up in a museum. The best part of it was the making of it, sitting at the table weaving while outside the lake crashed into shore and the seagulls roosted somewhere for the night and two women stopped for a moment to watch.”
Comments Click here to view or make a comment