Summer Book Club #2: The Beach Read

The joy of reading one of your favorite authors.

On Sunday morning, we woke up the kids and rode our bikes up to our favorite breakfast cafe. As we were sitting in the sunny banquette by the window eating pancakes and bacon, we hatched a plan to tackle one of our summer goals: Kayak to Secret Beach. The plan is written on the chalkboard in our kitchen, a way to hold ourselves accountable to these summer plans, and with the water calm and the wind still, it was the perfect day for it.

We found Secret Beach years ago while sitting on our favorite white sand beach in the summer community where we live. Across the water to the west, there’s a long strip of uninhabited white sand with low dunes behind it. It’s an estuary, a protected preserve that is undeveloped and unspoiled by houses or public access from the road. We know this because we took the paddle boards there once when my 14-year-old was young enough to ride on the front of the board as my husband paddled. My 9-year-old, about four, hitched a ride with me in the kayak.

We nicknamed this spot “Secret Beach,” since you can only access it by water and you’re likely the only person there upon arrival. Last time we went, piping plovers dive bombed us as we shell combed, the birds feeling threatened we might disturb their nests. (We moved far away.) There is a sandbar at one end of the beach that allows you walk so far out into the water and remain up to your knees. We were determined to get to Secret Beach once more, but it takes about forty-five minutes to an hour to get there, depending on the current and wind, etc. We weren’t sure if everyone would have the stamina on a steamy, humid Sunday but we decided to try.

This time, my 9-year-old traveled on the front of my husband’s paddle board, I kayaked and my teenager paddled on his own board. Cutting across the harbor turned out to be a breeze for all of us. We spotted schools of fish, a few jellyfish, and waved to a waterskier. When we pulled our boards onto Secret Beach though, we realized it wasn’t so secret anymore. A few jetski riders had parked in the shallows as did a couple with a Boston Whaler. We went straight to the sandbar, walking straight out into what feels like the middle of the Bay.

Then we sat on the beach and rested up. It was great fun to look back at the beach where we spend most of our summer days. Almost as though if I stared out long enough, I could see our lives unfolding all of these years in the distance. My babies and toddlers morphing into tall, skinny strignbeans with big ideas. All of us changing, evolving, growing. Sometimes it takes getting out of your comfort zone to be able to see your life with more clarity. It’s the perspective of a novelist.

Which leads me to the next summer book club pick. Because in this novel, the tension unravels when the characters gain fresh perspective on the past.

For the Love of Another Beatriz Williams Novel

Last summer, in our first Dear Fiction Summer Book Club, we read Beatriz Williams’ novel The Beach at Summerly and I raved about it. I love so many of her novels because they’re complex, surprising and they’re often set in beautiful East Coast summer towns and centered on waspy New England families with secrets. Throw in a government spy or two for good measure. So I eagerly awaited her latest Husbands & Lovers when it was released at the end of June, and just like most of Beatriz’s novels, I devoured it within a few days.

The story starts off with a gut punch: A young single mother named Mallory gets a call from her son’s summer camp that he’s been rushed to the hospital and in critical condition after being dared to eat a death cap mushroom. I was floored. The book cover depicted a woman in a seductive stance on a diving board? Now a 10-year-old kid might be dying? It wasn’t what I planned for.

White knuckled and heart pumping, I read on. The author then switches to a second timeline, this one belonging to a character named Hannah. This thread, we come to learn, is Mallory’s grandmother’s story. Set in Egypt in the 1950s, Hannah is bit by a cobra in the first chapter, and after a servant in the hotel comes to her rescue, they become friendly. Later, she begins having an affair with him.

It’s quite a bit of drama for the first fifty pages, but it’s why Beatriz is such a master of the historical beach novel. For a writer that so naturally mines the hearts and minds of her characters, she’s also fantastic at keeping action churning on every page.

The novel really takes off when we learn that Mallory, who must take her surviving son for dialysis every week until he can get a kidney donation, has been keeping a VERY BIG SECRET from him about his estranged father. It turns out that Mallory’s one great love is Monk Adams (you’ll recognize some of the families in this book from Summer Wives and The Beach at Summerly), and in 2008, when she was a nanny for his step-siblings, they had a summer fling. Then something tragic happens, they grow estranged and she hides her pregnancy from him. Monk grows up to be the John Mayer cool and gorgeous rock musician of his time.

I won’t say more about the plot specifically, but here’s what I can say about this book:

1. I loved going back in time to when the main character was a young woman and trying to figure out what happened between her and the boyfriend.

2. Beatriz has a commanding knowledge of Egyptian history, and learning about what it was like to be the wife of a British officer during the 1950s in Cairo draws you right into the simmering revolution.

3. The book is so much about forgiveness, how we can get the past wrong, how sometimes really big judgements about people we love are made without enough real facts. How that can lead to pain and regret.

4. It’s never too late to connect with a lost friend and/or flame.

5. Fictitious Winthrop Island is based on Fisher Island off eastern Long Island. Tourists are discouraged from visiting without an invite by one of the summer or year-round residents. Does anyone know someone there? I want to go!

6. For lovers of historical fiction but also, I think you rom-com lovers will enjoy this one, too. Her ability to write two young people falling in love is spot on. The dialogue is charming, and the romance feels familiar and unique all at once.

If you haven’t read anything by Beatriz Williams before, you’re in for a treat. This is a story that I know will stay with me, in part, because of all of its various complexities that are somehow pulled tied together into a neat little bow at the end.

A Few More Things

• Is anyone else obsessed with Chappell Roan’s music all of a sudden? I can’t stop listening to two of her songs: “Good luck, Babe,” and “Hot To Go.” Both of them are upbeat and feel like the perfect anthem to summer. I keep turning up the music every time the song comes on.

• The other night I watched the first episode of Season Five of “Fargo.” Um, the blow torch? WTF? It’s so crazy good already.

• In an interview recently, someone asked me if I was an observer as a child or if it was something that came in my adult years. It made me think of how much I used to love to sit and listen to adults talk when I was a kid. How I always loved to sit one-on-one with my grandmother and listen to her tell stories from the past. How I used to record in my journals from the time I was six. So yes, yes, I’ve been observing since I was a child. Now as a novelist, more than ever, I feel like I’m always reporting on life.

• Did you notice how similar the covers are for my novel All the Summers in Between and Husbands & Lovers? It’s because they were designed by the same Laguna Beach-based artist T.S. Harris. I’m going to try to interview Harris in an upcoming issue. Stay tuned.

• How cool is this?

  Friends & Fiction
  published a fabulous interview about beach reads featuring an interview with myself, Elin Hilderbrand, Mary Kay Andrews, Kristy Woodson Harvey and Nancy Thayer. It’s such a great chat, and I loved chatting with some of my fave authors. Check it out here.

• Lastly, I did this really fun Historical Happy Hour with another historical fiction writer named Jane Healey. It was such a fun interview that I thought I’d share it here. You can watch or listen.

I do so much more reading in summer than I do the rest of the year. It’s a matter of time but it’s also because I love reading outside and on the beach. Do you read the most books in summer, too? Where do you love to read the most? And what are you reading?

As always, if you like this post, show your support and “heart” it or click the comment button to share. And thank you for reading! Dear Fiction will be back at the end of the week with an Author Confessions column.