Rachel Hanna, $2.99, ISBN 978-1393666554
Contemporary Fiction, 2019
At 43, Julie is having the perfect life. Her kids are grown-up and doing fine, so they won’t email her begging for money.
She sells the house for lots of money. The housekeeper, who does all the work and ensures that Julie herself never has to do anything ignoble like bending over the scrub the toilet, is perfectly cheerful at being let go now that the house is to be sold.
She ran a popular online boutique, and she would continue to do so from her new beach house. In fact, she and Michael had put a contract on a place months ago, and the wonderful sellers had agreed to wait for them to get their house sold and tie up loose ends. The closing was coming up in a couple of weeks, and Michael had just enough time to go on one last business trip before officially retiring from his sales job.
What a wonderful life, huh?
As Julie stood in the big front window overlooking her driveway, she watched Agnes pull away in her small compact car and through the gates of her wealthy neighborhood. Yes, they’d been so blessed financially over the years, but now they were blessed in a different kind of way. With love. With a strong marriage that had stood the test of time. With a new start in a whole new place, away from the hustle and bustle of suburban Atlanta.
Okay, who’s beaming with petty joy when Michael announces the moment he is back from his business trip that he’s leaving her? Just me?
Well, all you noble people will doubtless be overjoyed to learn that divorce only means bouts of self-pity for our heroine as all her friends rally around her and assure her that she’s awesome.
She then finds a new, lovely place to stay in some island, finds an equally fine new man, and her husband comes back to grovel so that she can finally gain closure by realizing that, yes, indeed, she is the superior being far better than all mortals in this world.
Oh, there is some supposed drama about how her new home needs a lot of fixing, but you know how it is. That’s just an excuse for the hot man to come calling!
In fact, the only drama in this story is Julie for some reason letting Michael string her back and along again, after she knows that he’s a cheating SOB, and all of this seems suspiciously like the author’s way to pad the pages and show me what a sainted doyenne of perfection that our heroine is.
There is a phrase to describe Rachel Hanna’s The Beach House: divorced wine mom porn. Okay, actual wine moms are unlikely to read this, as they have better things to do like reading reviews of top aesthetic doctors in the neighborhood and such, so let’s make that the great unwashed that wish they are like what they think wine moms are.
There is hardly any drama here to mar the heroine’s life of beatific privilege, as even a divorce is just a brief dip that doesn’t stop Julie’s streak of having everything handed to her. She’s awesome and she gets her happy ending, because of what she is, rather than what she does to get that happy ending. Practically everyone she meets, those that aren’t designated to be the obvious bad guys, loves her at first sight because she’s just… just… Julie!
As far as the narrative goes, this story is an easy read. The secondary characters in Julie’s new fiefdom are all stereotypical small town types, but they don’t get too over the top to grate on my nerves, so I’d consider that a plus.
All these don’t detract from how this one is a very predictable and formulaic story, however, and worse, it’s a boring one because the wondrous Julie just sails through everything without any genuine-seeming upset or difficulty. Sure, I’d love to have her life, but reading about that life puts me to sleep!
