The beach house

Jane Green, 1968-

Book - 2008

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FICTION/Green, Jane
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Subjects
Published
New York, N.Y. : Viking 2008.
Language
English
Main Author
Jane Green, 1968- (-)
Physical Description
341 p. ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780670018857
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Sixty-five-year-old Nan Powell has lived comfortably and happily in Nantucket since the suicide of her husband, Everett, so she is thrown for a loop when she learns that she is in danger of losing her beloved house. After weighing her options, Nan decides to turn her home into a bed-and-breakfast. The guests she gets for the summer are all at a crossroads in their lives in one way or another. Daniel has just separated from his wife and is facing something he has denied for years; Daff is recovering from the heartbreak of a divorce and getting a much-needed break from her anger-filled 13-year-old daughter; and Nan's son Michael is on the run from a disastrous affair. Nan finds herself opening up to her guests and enjoying their company, but she is shocked when she discovers a person close to one of them has a startling connection to her. Peopled with likable, flawed, realistic characters and moving seamlessly between them, this is Green's best novel in years, a compelling, unputdownable read.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

What begins as edgy and smart gets stuck in the sand in popular chick lit author Green's (Second Chance) soggy beach read. Richard and Daff separate after Richard has an affair, which plays havoc with their daughter, Jess. Bee and Daniel, who go to therapy to bridge their emotional gap, wind up facing the uncomfortable truth of what really separates them. Middle-aged Michael keeps finding all the wrong women, and Michael's dotty and endearing mom Nan, facing flagging finances, raises funds by letting rooms in her venerable Nantucket beach home, only to have to ward off ravenous developers. There's enough upheaval to keep the tale humming until the cast lands on Nan's doorstep, where, with unrelenting good humor and wisdom, the troubles with couples, families, kids, singles and sexual identity are predictably resolved before the Labor Day exodus. Unfortunately, the payoffs diminish as the story wears on. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

This is a heartwarming tale of how a land-rich but cash-poor 65-year-old widow saves her Nantucket home by taking in summer boarders. Green's (Second Chance) trademark assemblage of appealing characters--a recently separated father of two young daughters, a single mother of a teenager--gradually fill up Nan's home, and their interactions bring hope back into these strangers' lives. Even Nan is taken by surprise when a visitor brings more than just long-lost memories. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/08.] (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A Nantucket house sparks romance and mystery in the latest from Green (Second Chance, 2007, etc.). Windermere is a glorious beach house on the shores of Nantucket. The home has been the site of riotous parties, romance and tremendous loss. The Powell family has inhabited Windermere for generations. Nan Powell--a woman of a certain age--is the current occupant. Despite suffering the loss of her husband on Windermere's beach, Nan decided to stay put and raise her son, Michael, in Nantucket. Now alone in her large home, Nan refuses to downsize. She adores rambling around in her home and watching the developers drool over her nine acres of oceanfront property. As an aging widow, Nan has earned a reputation as a bit of an eccentric--this suits her just fine. Her cavalier attitude catches up with her when she finds out that all of her investments have tanked and she is out of cash. To make ends meet, Nan decides to let out rooms at Windermere. She dusts off the furniture and writes an ad. Woosh. A breath of fresh air enters the somewhat musty home as Nan welcomes her boarders. The boarders make up an odd lot: There's Daniel, newly out of the closet and estranged from his wife; Daff, a single mother trying to find herself and deal with an unruly teenage daughter; and Michael, Nan's son, a refugee from New York after an affair with his boss turns sour. The combination of Nan's meddling and Windermere's magic brings unexpected romance. As love blossoms all around her, Nan comes to terms with her future. Spending a few hours combing through the gardens and beaches of Green's Nantucket is a great way to make a long plane ride seem much shorter. And if you can't recall much of the plot after turning the last page, so what? Neatly packaged beach diversion. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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. Excerpted from The Beach House by Jane Green All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.