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THE BEACH HOUSE by Jane Green
On Sale: June 17th
Hardcover
352 pages
ISBN-10: 0670018856
ISBN-13: 9780670018857
From the bestselling author of SECOND CHANCE comes a captivating novel about the strength of family, friendship, and self-discovery.
Known in Nantucket as the eccentric woman who lives in the sprawling house atop the bluff, Nan doesn't care what people think. She's 65-years-old, her beauty has faded, and her family has either passed on or left. If her neighbors are away, why shouldn't she skinny-dip in their swimming pools?
But when she discovers her finances are dwindling and she might lose her beloved house, Nan knows she has to make drastic changes. So, she takes out an ad: rooms to rent for the summer in a beautiful old Nantucket home.
Slowly, people start moving into the house, filling it with noise, laughter, and tears. But just as her house comes alive again and Nan finds her family expanding, an unexpected visitor turns everyone's lives upside down.
Jane Green has written nine previous novels, including several New York Times bestsellers, and won the Cosmopolitan Fun Fearless Fiction Award in 2007. A native Londoner, Green now lives in Connecticut with her partner, four children and many animals.
Beloved author Jane Green, herself a recent transplant to the United States, sets her latest novel, THE BEACH HOUSE, in perhaps the quintessential American coastal environment: the island of Nantucket. Almost without realizing it, long-time widow Nan Powell has gained a bit of a reputation in her town. Living alone in a historic beachfront house, Windermere, freely bathing (nude) in her neighbors' pools and transplanting their hydrangeas, the old woman, cycling down island roads in all weather, has become an eccentric island fixture.
But Nan's free-spiritedness has been bound to catch up with her sooner or later. Windermere is getting old and run down, and Nan has also neglected her finances, remaining blissfully unaware of her dwindling assets until her financial adviser alerts her to the very real possibility that she'll lose her house. When Nan decides to bring in summer boarders to supplement her income and save her home from bloodthirsty developers, she also secretly hopes to bring Windermere back to the old days, when it was bursting with life, overflowing with laughter and love.
It doesn't take long for Windermere to work its magic, despite the troubled backgrounds of the boarders who make their way there. There's Daniel, who's hiding a life-changing secret from his separated wife, who can't understand why he's walking away from the perfect marriage. There's Daff, a divorced mother of an attention-seeking teenaged daughter caught between her hard-working, grieving mother, and her father, who has moved on with a new girlfriend. And there's Nan's own son, Michael, whose latest girlfriend in a string of failed relationships might have been the worst mistake of all.
Much like the Nantucket coast, Green's prose is characterized by breezy, effervescent storytelling. Rapid shifts from character to character help move the story along, and even the minor characters (like Michael's married girlfriend and Daff's ex-husband) have their (brief) moments in the sun. Green is most effective when setting up each character’s unique background, situation and personal crisis. Once the players are gathered at Windermere, the novel --- just like a good weekend at the beach --- develops into a dreamy haze of sun-dappled good feelings, interrupted only occasionally by a few rocky patches.
Skeletons lurk in almost everyone's closets in this book, and they all get a good airing before each crisis's inevitable conclusion. Although THE BEACH HOUSE offers readers few surprises, comfort, not confrontation, is what most want out of their summer novels. And Green's latest offers comfort in abundance. Reassuring reunions, self-discovery, transformation --- not to mention secret inheritances and true love --- lie in store and result in a supremely satisfying happy ending. All these elements help ensure that the book will leave readers --- much like the inhabitants of Windermere --- swept away by the spell of Nantucket's charming past, before SUVs, celebrities and multi-million-dollar houses displaced old families, friendly gatherings and authentic homes.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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From Chapter One
The bike crunches along the gravel path, weaving around the potholes that could present danger to someone who didn't know the road like the back of their hand.
The woman on the bike raises her head and looks at the ski, sniffs, smiles to herself. A foggy day in Nantucket, but she has lived here long enough to know this is merely a morning fog, and the bright early-June sunshine will burn it off by midday, leaving a beautiful afternoon.
Good. She is planning lunch on the deck today, is on her way into town via her neighbor's house, where she has spent the last hour or so cutting the large blue mophead hydrangeas and stuffing them into the basket on the front of the bike. She doesn't really know these neighbors --- so strange to live in the same house you have lived in for forty-five years, a house in a town where once you knew everyone, until one day you wake up and realize you don't know people anymore --- but she has guessed from the drawn blinds and absence of cars they are not yet here, and they will not miss a couple of dozen hydrangea heads.
The gate to their rear garden was open, and she had heard around town they had brought in some super-swanky garden designer. She had to look. And the pool had been open, the water was so blue, so inviting, it was practically begging her to strip off and jump in, which of course she did, her body still slim and strong, her legs tan and muscled from the daily hours on the bike.
She dried off naturally, walking naked around the garden, popping strawberries and peas into her mouth in the kitchen garden, admiring the roses that were just starting, and climbing back into her clothes with a contented sigh when she was quite dry.
These are the reasons Nan has come to have a reputation for being slightly eccentric. A reputation she is well aware of, and a reputation she welcomes, for it affords her freedom, allows her to do the things she really wants to do, the things other people don't dare, and because she is thought of as eccentric, exceptions are always made.
It is, she thinks wryly, one of the beautiful things about growing old, so necessary when there is so much else that is painful. At sixty-five she still feels thirty, and on occasion, twenty, but she has long ago left behind the insecurities she had at twenty and thirty, those niggling fears: that her beauty wasn't enough, not enough for the Powell family; that she had somehow managed to trick Everett Powell into marrying her; that once her looks started to fade, they would all realize she wasn't anyone, wasn't anything, and would then treat her as she had always expected when she first married into this illustrious family... as nothing.
Her looks had served her well. Continue to serve her well. She is tall, skinny and strong, her white hair is glossy and sleek, pulled back in a chignon, her cheekbones still high, her green eyes still twinkling with amusement under perfectly arched brows.
Nan's is a beauty that is rarely seen these days, a natural elegance and style that prevailed throughout the fifties, but as mostly disappeared today, although Nan doesn't see it, not anymore
Now when she looks in the mirror she sees the lines, her cheeks concave under her cheekbones, the skin so thin it sometimes seems that she can see her bones. She covers as many of the imperfections as she can with makeup, still feels that she cannot leave her house without full makeup, her trademark scarlet lipstick the first thing she puts on every morning, before her underwear even, before her bath.
But these days her makeup is sometimes patchy, her lipstick smudging over the lines in her lips, lines that they warned her about in the eighties, when her son tried to get her to stop smoking, holding up photographs in magazines of women with dead, leathery skin.
"I can't give up smoking," she would say, frowning. "I enjoy it too much, but I promise you, as soon as I stop enjoying it, I'll give it up."
The day is yet to come.
Thirty years younger and she would never have dared trespass, swim naked in an empty swimming pool without permission. Thirty years younger and she would have cared too much what people thought, wouldn't have cut flowers or carefully dug up a few strawberry plants that would certainly not be missed, to replant them in her own garden.
But thirty years younger and perhaps, if she had dared and had been caught, she would have got away with it. She would have apologized, would have invited the couple back for a drink, and the husband would have flirted with her, would have taken the pitcher of rum punch out of her hand and insisted on pouring it for her as she bent her head down to light her cigarette, looking up at him through those astonishing green eyes, flicking her blond hair ever so slightly and making him feel like the most important man in the room, hell, the only man in the room, the wife be damned.
Thirty years younger and the women might have ignored her, but not, as they do now, because they think she's the crazy woman in the big old house on the bluff, but because they were threatened, because they were terrified that she might actually have the power to take their men, ruin their lives. And they were right.
Not that she ever did.
Not back then.
Of course there have been a few affairs, but Nan was never out to steal a man from someone else, she just wanted some fun, and after Everett died, after years of being on her own, she came to realize that sometimes sex was, after all, just sex, and sometimes you just had to take it where you could find it.
From THE BEACH HOUSE by Jane Green, Copyright © 2008 by Jane Green, published by Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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