by Mandy Wilks

Created on: September 27, 2010   Last Updated: October 01, 2010

I have a little confession to make, I love ‘chick lit’ books! I know, I know but I can’t help it, and they are always on my holiday list for packing when I go away.

Jane Green is a British “chick lit” author that I have come across before so when I saw this book Ms Green’s 10th novel, on offer in my local Tesco I popped it into my basket ready for a trip to Minorca; I thought that it would be perfect for beach reading- especially with a title like ‘The Beach House’. With 420 pages this was just about the right length for me and it had a pretty book cover so there was no doubt that it would suit me!

The story in this book is about a 65 year old rather eccentric lady called Nan Everett, who has lived for 40 years in a huge, beautiful but rather ramshackle beach house called Windermere, on the South coastal American island of Nantucket. She loves her life there but since the disappearance of her husband at sea and her son having left home her dreams of filling the house with laughter and children have diminished.

When she finds that she is quickly running out of money and the property developers are desperate for her much loved home and land Nan makes the decision to rent the many rooms in the beach house to holiday makers for the summer, anything would be better to Nan than losing her home which holds so many memories for her – and just maybe her beloved home may be filled with the laughter and happiness she would so love.

So, instead of selling the house and her memories with it, she decides to open up the spare rooms to holiday makers. With the “water views and access to the beach”, it isn’t long before the visitors begin to arrive.

The magic of Windermere soon begins to unravel itself and the visitors to the house, many with troubles of their own, slowly begin to relax and skeletons begin falling out of cupboards.

As well as the visitors like Bee and Daniel, and Daff and Richard and their mixture of fractious children comes Nan’s son, Michael, returning home from New York for the summer after having an affair with the wife of his boss.

All the visitors are destined to have their lives changed forever and then there is another, very much unexpected visitor who will arrive, one who will reveal some startling secrets and completely change everything. There is no denying that this is a ‘chick lit’, fluff however you wish to describe it, but it is also a great book to get lost in, it is easy to read and, in my opinion, the perfect ‘holiday read’.

This is very much a character driven novel, and while Nan is certainly the focal point in the novel, she is not the only character interesting character, in fact the lives of all the characters gel very well – each with their own interesting story – so much so that almost all of them could have had a book written solely about them and their lives and problems.

It is the fantastic mix of so many extremely different characters and their situations, and how we watch these characters evolve and use their different circumstances to help each other that makes this book such a refreshing change from the norm.

There are lots of twists and turns (and yes some are quite predictable) but this is a very easy and fun book to read, it’s no great work of literature but if you are looking for an interesting, character driven book that is just a little different from the normal ‘chick lit’ type story then I would recommend that you read this fresh, simple story, I don’t think that you will be disappointed.

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