It's started getting warmer here. Oh, my poor sister is still in the land of ice and snow but I saw my first bumblebee yesterday, hovering around the forsythia and ready to go into business. It's time to start thinking of sandals and sunscreen, vacations and fireworks. It's time to start thinking about summer and books to read at the beach. Beach Lit is, from what I've seen , a well-known but under-appreciated genre. Yes, the book must be light enough in tone and weight to fit with life by the surf and it needs to be entertaining but, most of all, it needs to remind the reader why life and living are precious. There should be some lessons learned, some perspectives changed and, to be perfect, it should have something to do with the natural world. Do you want to stretch out on your towel and imagine yourself in the stock exchange? Of course not! At any rate, a novel is coming out next month that will fit perfectly into this category. If you are looking for a new take on some traditional escapist fare, tuck a copy of Karen White's The Sound of Glass into your beach tote, next to the sun screen.
Ms. White is one of the host of Southern Women led by Anne Rivers Siddons and Dorothea Benton Franks who write, well...beach books. The lead characters are women who are casually connected to homes of antiquity or artistic merit (in the South, many women want to look young and live in a house that's Older than Dirt) and they have a Challenge to Meet. There's usually an upheaval in the woman's life, a choice that is Wrong and a good-looking man that is Right. Pure escapism. Karen White folds a layer of mysticism to her stories which goes awfully well with old houses. In The Sound of Glass, the mysticism is how damaged women connect through space and time.
Merritt's Heyward is a widow on the run from Maine and her past when she takes the reins of an old house in Beaufort, South Carolina. Like Garbo, she insists she"Just Wants to Be Alone" but none of her new southern friends are listening, from the zealous neighbors who trade casseroles for an inside gawk at her house to the Alabama step-mother who appears, without warning, to visit...well, stay. Merritt's tenure in the house unearths evidence of some ugly family secrets and Merritt has to free them (and her own fears) before she can re-engage with the life she lost so many years ago.
There are a few problems with the plot. Merritt's South Carolina home belonged to her late husband's grandmother who willed it to Merritt's husband, her dead grandson. Problem is, the grandson pre-deceased his grandmother which would make the house, in probate lingo, a lapsed gift. Since grandma didn't know or make provision for Merritt, a relation only by marriage, it's unlikely our heroine would inherit that real estate, especially when there's a blood grandson in the picture. But the story is built on Merritt needing the house (and vice versa) so forgive the writer her trespasses. Forgiveness is a lot of what The Sound of Glass is about anyway, the need to forgive ourselves and our pasts so we can go forward and live. Ms. White is right on that point as well as the sea glass she uses as a metaphor for the women who live in the house. Sometimes glass falls into the ocean and bounces around there for years. The pieces that make it to the shore have been tossed, tumbled, bumped and pounded for years and they are sometimes rough-edged and cloudy. But they're strong and beautiful in wind chimes when flowing breezes make them ring. Merritt Heyward and the other women in her life have endured a long age of pounding and they are like the sea glass. They may look brittle and cloudy but they're strong and beautiful, when you see them in the right light.
This story won't be on the short-list for the Pulitzer this year (although it could work in a Lifetime movie) but that's not what's required in Beach books. Beach books are for fun, for entertainment and most of all to remind us why we work all year for just a few days in the sun. Because life slips away from us when we're focused on the job and our vacations remind us how precious and fleeting time is. So we enjoy our moments reconnecting with life, ourselves and those we love. Those themes are also part of The Sound of Glass. That's why it's a perfect book for the Beach.
The Sound of Glass will be available on May 12, 2015. Thanks to NetGalley for giving me an early look at the manuscript.
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