Review of "Beach Trip"

NOT A GOOD TRIP

I am always, always in search of another great women bonding book similar to Saving Graces by Patricia Gaffney or Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons by Lorna Landvik. When I came upon Beach Trip, I thought it had potential. Certainly the cover was beautiful, the premise of four college roommates meeting up again some 20 years later was a good one and the author seemed to have a huge fan base. I was getting ready to leave for a Las Vegas vacation and decided this would be the book I would take with me. Reading on the plane, reading at the pool....I could picture it all as I was packing my bag.

So I started it en route to Las Vegas leaving from Philadelphia and probably put it down by the time we reached Ohio and opted instead for a magazine. That was not a good sign as Ohio connects to Pennsylvania. So I tried again at the pool. After about 10 pages, I put it down thinking perhaps it was too hot outside to read. Each time I picked it up, I had a different reason for putting it down. The book jumped back and forth between the years the girls were living together in college in 1980 and their week's vacation on Whale Head Island, North Carolina twenty-three years later. As the story was jumping back and forth, I was doing the same thing in picking it up and putting it down.

At this point, I'd like to make a statement about women bonding books. If you are an author and you want the reader to bond with these women, the reader has to like them. Why would a reader bond with characters they don't like? I didn't like any of these characters. And, here's another tidbit...if you have your characters drinking from the minute they wake up in the morning until they close their eyes at night, I like them even less. I'm not saying that a reader has to like every character in every book they read. But in a "bonding" book, such as this, it would help.

I can't figure out if I liked them less as college students or less as the women they became. In college, we will meet Lola....beautiful and from a wealthy political family where the world will be her oyster. When we meet her again, she has married the man her mother has chosen, seems very ditsy and definitely is not in love. Then there's Mel....very outgoing in college and getting every guy she wants. We meet her again and she is twice divorced, very outspoken and definitely can't commit to one man. In college, Sara stood in the background and didn't go after what she wanted. Later she is a married attorney with an autistic son but definitely able to go after what she wants. Annie is the OCD college student spending more time cleaning than enjoying her college days (or so her friends think). Now she is married and experiencing empty nest syndrome while still cleaning her house with every waking hour she has.

Now I ask you, do these sound like women you would want to be friends with? During the vacation week, when they aren't drinking, they are eating and fighting and shopping and lounging and trying to pick up younger men and drinking some more. It's here that many of the secrets, that were supposedly hidden from the reader and each other, will be exposed. I can't imagine that there are too many readers out there that didn't figure out these secrets long before the author chose to spell them out.

You're probably wondering how I ended up finishing this book after putting it down so many times. It all happened in the Las Vegas airport when my flight home was delayed three separate times because of bad weather in Philadelphia. At one point, we had already gotten on the plane only to be told to get off again. So in a way, the book ended up giving me a respite from all the aggravation I was feeling with my situation. I just wish the book I had chosen for this trip had been a better one.

3 of 5 stars