by Steph Bond

Created on: September 27, 2010   Last Updated: September 29, 2010

Jane Green is a “chick lit” author who I have come across a few times during my life! I love reading, especially chick lit type books, and even though been pregnant I don’t seem to have the energy to sit up all night reading anymore, I still love to have a read of my books before bed most nights!

This book was the last one I read, and although it took me a couple of weeks to complete it, I really enjoyed it!

I bought this book a while ago from Books Direct book club online, and it has sat on my book shelf for a while now, having hundreds of books (literally!) on my bookcase to read, this one wasn’t one of the “top” books I had to read, so it was a while before I picked it up to read! But I needed a sunshine fix in April when the rain was pouring, and this book, been called The Beach House, made me think of holidays in the sun and so I decided on this to be my Spring read!

Plot
The story is about an old lady, Nan, living on an Island called Nantucket in the USA, she has lived all her life in her huge house, Windermere, she has lived there ever since way before her husband  killed himself due to his gambling addiction and her son, Matthew was born.

Now 40 years on, she is still there all alone bar her house keeper Sarah. And in money problems! With hundreds of builders and developers hunting after buying the huge house off Nan for millions of dollars to build elite mansions for the rich! So, instead of selling the house and her memories with it, she decides to open up the spare rooms to holiday makers.

It is then the story develops into the lives of Michael- Nan’s middle aged son and his love life, Daniel and his wife Bee, and their two young children, and the new battles they have to face, and finally Daff and her family when her husband has left her for another woman and her teenage daughter seems to have drifted away from her. Life will never be the same for any of them again though once the truths are revealed and revelations are turned out.

The book took me a while to get into, but this was more my lifestyle than the book itself! Once I started reading again, I found it hard to put the book down again! The lives of all the characters gel together very well, and keep the reader engrossed in the story and what is going to happen! It keeps you guessing and has enough twists and turns throughout to keep us engrossed! The book has us second guessing each and every judgement we make about the characters and what is going to happen in their own individual stories, which I love, I hate a book which is very predictable and I know right from the start what is going to happen!

The story is written in the Third Person (i.e. Emma went to the shops to meet up with the man she met in the bar last night.), and is cut up into relatively short chapters, each of which goes into the stories of all characters rather than a chapter for one character then another chapter for another.

The book is 420 pages long as so isn’t too long for a summer read or something to take to bed with you.

I thought this book was going to be very much summer and holidays related, but it didn’t turn out to be that kind of book, I love the books by Belinda Jones because of the imagery used by the author which takes you to the place the book is about, I love this in a book as it means I can be carried away to the story and the place and “be there” with the characters, this book didn’t really have this, so it was quite hard to lose myself in the book and imagine the scene it set.

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