Fast forward to 2011. The narrator is thirty-something Ava Whalen, also a midwife, who falls deeply in love with kindred spirit Matthew Frazier. They marry, move to his ancestral home on St. Simons Island with Ava believing that happiness awaits her. She quickly discovers, however, that both her new husband and her new home hold mysteries linked to the past, including the circumstances surrounding the death of his first wife, a beautiful accomplished woman. As soon as the reader steps into the house, an eerie feeling starts to build. For Ava there are many déjà-vu moments that she cannot explain. Nightmares and fear of water pursue her. How does the scent of ashes connect with her feeling of not quite belonging?

As usual, Karen White tells an interesting tale of the South. St. Simons Island is a beautiful place filled with “canopies of live oak trees, with their curled arms holding up the moss like a woman displaying her jewellery.” The author excels at descriptions of time and place, seamlessly navigating between the 1800s and the present, with charming descriptions of Island life, clothes, and attitudes of both periods. For history buffs, the War of 1812 makes an appearance!

New American Library - Penguin Group
Published May 2011
Trade Paperback, 403 pages

Reviewed by Sandra

When I began this novel and read that the story takes place in the American South, I envisioned it to be peopled with beautiful Southern belles, gracious aging matriarchs, handsome men, servants with secrets, set against a backdrop of elegant family homes. I wasn’t far off the mark. It’s all of that and more.

There are two narrators, a young woman named Julie whose sister disappeared years earlier. Julie has put her life on hold as she searches for her abducted sister. She travels to Biloxi, Mississippi to meet the family of her dear friend, Monica, who has died and left Julie a portrait, a beach house called River Song and custody of her 5-year-old son. Aimee, an aging woman who has lost her own family member is the matriarch of the family who welcomes both Julie and Monica’s son, Beau back to the family home. Throw in a handsome young lawyer and the rest is history, as they say.

There is an excellent development of the mystery that is at the heart of the story - it is a total surprise! Good character development of Julie allows the reader to see how she grows from an insecure young woman to becoming a person who has finally learned to relinquish the past and begin living her own life. She is a survivor.

The descriptions evoke the South. For example, describing Aimee’s home we read of “wide front steps led up to a gracious front wraparound porch dotted with wicker rocking chairs and more plants hanging from the porch ceiling. Marching turrets framed the front of the house like parentheses….Large double wooden doors sat in the middle, long rectangular windows in each polished door like drooping eyes staring warily at the encroaching garden.”

The novel is particularly interesting in that it takes place in the post-Katrina, post oil spill of 2010 Gulf Coast. The author describes some of the devastation experienced by the people there. She refers to “Katrina trees”, that is, trees that died when the storm surge brought in salt water and killed them. These beautiful oak trees were “too painful to look at” so artists began transforming them into different sculpture, such as dolphins, egrets and other animals. They became works of art. I “Googled” Katrina trees and was amazed at the ingenuity and vision of the artists. Beauty triumphed over death and destruction.

This story, then, is about survival and rebuilding . It’s a parallel story of those real, hard-working survivors of the Gulf Coast disasters and the fictional people in The Beach Trees. It’s a very good read.

About the Author:
Known for award-winning novels such as Learning to Breathe, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance 2009 Book of the Year Award finalist The House on Tradd Street, the highly praised The Memory of Water, the four-week SIBA bestseller The Lost Hours, Pieces of the Heart, and her IndieBound national bestseller The Color of Light, Karen has shared her appreciation of the coastal Low country with readers in four of her last six novels.

Italian and French by ancestry, a southerner and a storyteller by birth, Karen has made her home in many different places.

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she has also lived in Texas, New Jersey, Louisiana, Georgia, Venezuela and England, where she attended the American School in London. She returned to the states for college and graduated from New Orleans’ Tulane University. Hailing from a family with roots firmly set in Mississippi (the Delta and Biloxi), Karen notes that "searching for home brings me to the south again and again."

Visit the author at her website, and become a fan on Facebook.
If you want to follow this tour and read what other bloggers are saying about this book, here is the tour list.


Disclosure: Thanks to Trish Collins from TLC Tours and Penguin Books for sending me this book for review. I was not compensated in any other way, nor told how to rate or review this product.

New American Library

ISBN: 978-0-451-22649-5

Published: April 2009

Trade Paperback, 343 pages

Reviewed by Sandra

This story is set in Savannah, Georgia, so immediately I imagined a story about romance, intrigue, and “the South”. I wasn’t disappointed. Karen White is an excellent storyteller with lots of imagination, weaving in dark secrets with poignant family situations ranging from Alzheimer’s to blindness, life-long friendships and more. Throw in racial issues and the reader is kept fascinated to the end. The timeline flicks back and forth from present-day to the 1930’s segregated South.

The author uses an interesting technique, alternating between first person accounts and third-person narrative thus allowing the reader to get a rounded out understanding of the story. There are 4 primary characters, each with their own fears, insecurities, regrets, guilt. In short, real people!

Earlene/Piper disregarded her grandmother, Annabelle, even before her death, thinking that “long before the Alzheimer’s got her mind, a fear of living had taken hold of her spirit, convincing me that my grandmother had no stories worth listening to.” However, in researching her deceased grandmother’s past she unearths a buried box containing a bunch of scrapbook pages and a picture of 3 young girls. In her grandmother’s attic she stumbles upon a hidden room. The scrapbook pages, the room, a blue baby sweater and blanket, and a 1939 newspaper clipping of the death of a black baby boy are at the heart of the mystery in the book. “There are some things that should never be forgotten – like the worth of an old friendship, and a secret to take to the grave”, is the comment made by Lillian, one of Annabelle’s childhood friends, who holds the answer to the mystery.

The character development is excellent. We see Lillian move from a child, to a beautiful young woman to a 90-year-old matriarch who is full of love for her granddaughter, and who, in her own words “attributed her longevity to her stubborn ability to never confuse grief with regret.” We note the change in Earlene/Piper from a bitter, self-centered person to a loving, considerate woman open to new possibilities in her life. My favourite person was Helen. Read the book to experience the incredible nuances of her personality, talent, love.

The descriptions of the oak trees throughout the book are impressive. They seem to take on the attitudes of the people in the story at various times. At one point the narrator calls them “grieving oaks”, then as a “canopy of old men protecting what was theirs.” Finally, they become “strong and supple again, each limb bearing the bud of new life, each shawl of moss swaying with the promise of forgiveness.”

I highly recommend this book. Family relationships, family secrets, friendship, love, renewal, forgiveness, and the strength to go forward are explored in this intriguing tale, well told.


Disclosure: I was not compensated in any way, nor told how to rate or review this book.