Enjoy the Day at the Beach with These Two Books

by Susan Roberts

It is officially summer! Have you been filling up your beach bag with the great reads out this summer? I have two more for you to add to the list.
Amazon affiliate links are used in this post. Free books were provided for an honest review.

Beach House for Rent (Beach House #4) by Mary Alice Monroe

June 2017; Gallery Books; 978-1501125461
ebook, audio, print (416 pages); women's fiction

I feel as if I have just taken a trip to the beach and spent time with friends. Mary Alice Monroe creates such wonderful characters that you feel as if you know them and the South Carolina Low Country is always an important part of her novels.

Cara Rutledge is the daughter of Lovie from book 1 and she inherited Lovie's beach house. She and her husband, Brett, rent the house out for the summer and just got a rental for the entire summer from Heather a young woman from NC who suffers from extreme social anxiety and has come to the beach to paint shore birds. As Heather works to overcome her anxiety, Cara suffers a life-changing tragedy and wants to return to her mother's house. Can two women from such different age groups and backgrounds share the same home happily? This is a wonderful story about friendship and love and healing from tragedy.

Mary Alice Monroe is a dedicated conservationist and her love of animals is very apparent in this book with sea turtles as well as pelicans. I always learn new things when I read her books while I am enjoying her novel and taking my mini mental vacation to the beach.

About the book

New York Times bestselling author Mary Alice Monroe returns to her beloved Isle of Palms to tell the poignant, charming story of two women, one summer, and one very special beach house.

When Cara Rutledge rents out her quaint beach house on Isle of Palms to Heather Wyatt for the entire summer, it’s a win-win by any standard: Cara’s generating income necessary to keep husband Brett’s ecotourism boat business afloat, and anxiety-prone Heather, a young artist who’s been given a commission to paint birds on postage stamps, has a quiet space in which to work and tend to her pet canaries uninterrupted.

It isn’t long, however, before both women’s idyllic summers are altered irrevocably: the alluring shorebirds—and the man who rescues them—begin to draw Heather out of the shell she’s cultivated toward a world of adventure, and maybe even love; at the same time, Cara’s life reels with sudden tragedy, and she wishes only to return to the beach house that had once been her port amidst life’s storms. When Heather refuses to budge from her newfound sanctuary, so begins the unlikeliest of rooming situations. While they start out as strangers, as everything around the women falls apart they learn that the only thing they can really rely on is each other.

And, like the migrating shorebirds that come to the island for the summer, these two women of different generations must rediscover their unique strengths so by summer’s end they, too, can take flight in ways they never imagined possible.

Note – this book can be read as a stand-alone without any confusion.

Buy Beach House for Rent at Amazon

Cocoa Beach by Beatriz Williams

June 2017; William Morrow; 978-0062404985
ebook, audio, print (384 pages); historical fiction

Virginia is definitely a strong woman. When we first meet her she is driving an ambulance in France during WWI. She left her family home and all of her secrets behind in New York and ran away to France to help with the war. While there she meets a British doctor, Simon, who will change the whole course of her life. The book moves between Virginia's days in France and five years later when she moves to Florida to try to find out what happened to her husband and to settle his estate. This move puts her life and the life of her young daughter in danger and she continues to face challenges as she tries to solve the mystery surrounding his death.

This was a fantastic very readable book. The author knew both time periods very well and managed to give us a look at life in the early part of the 20th century as she crafted an immensely interesting mystery plot. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys historical fiction.

I won a copy of this book in a Goodreads giveaway. I've never read this author before and I enjoyed this book so much that I'm now ordering her older books to read.

Buy Cocoa Beach at Amazon on June 27

Other books by Beatriz Williams:
The Wicked City (2017)
A Certain Age (2016)
The Forgotten Room (2016)
Along the Infinite Sea (2015)
Tiny Little Things (2015)

Susan Roberts lives in North Carolina when she isn't traveling.  She and her husband enjoy traveling, gardening and spending time with their family and friends.  She reads almost anything (and the piles of books in her house prove that) but her favorite genres are Southern fiction, women's fiction, and thrillers. Susan is a top 1% Goodreads Reviewer. You can connect with Susan on Facebook.

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