The Beach House

Rating:
Summary: A Gift to Yourself
Review: Ms. Monroe delivers another powerful look at our important relationships; this time between mother and daughter. The loggerheads provide a poignant backdrop of the ancient tracks of maternal instincts. The best part was going to the beach! I really needed it, albeit vicaiously. The writing makes you feel like you are actuallly there at Primrose Cottage; and you don't want to leave. It was particulaly interesting to learn more about the South Carolina coastlines and peek into Southern family dynamics. Give yourself a gift and read this book! You won't set it down and you will find yourself going back to the beachouse in your memory or rereading again throughout the days.

Rating:
Summary: Welcome Home
Review: Ms. Monroe is wonderful in this novel! Anyone who loves animals and is interested in nature and the preservation of it, will fall in love with this book and the loggerhead turtles! And for anyone in love with the South, especially South Carolina, you will adore the imagery and the wonderful way in which Ms. Monroe brings Charleston, Isle of Palms, Sullivan's Island, and many more places from South Carolina to life! This is a true page-turner! Open the novel and you will fall in love with all the characters, especially Miss Lovie!

Rating:
Summary: Clean dialogue
Review: Ms. Monroe's painstaking devotion to description is
delightful. It's as though I'm sharing a cup of coffee with
the author while she tells me a story.
Thanks for 'The Beach House.'

Rating:
Summary: Profoundly Moving
Review: Once in a while a book comes along containing prose that feels as though it was given voice from my heart. As most women do, I have had issues with the personal relationship between my mother and myself. Through the character development and emotional investment Ms. Monroe weaves through the text of this lovely book, I found it personally inspiring and uplifting.

As I traveled through Ms. Monroe's words, I felt several bands labeled with my mother's name constricting my heart loosen and let go, and I was able to 'forgive' my mother for trespasses and slights, both real & imagined. Perhaps even more importantly, I was also moved to ask her forgiveness for the hurts I have inflicted upon her heart.

I highly recommend this book for all women who have mothers. The underlying theme of this book is that it is only too late to heal if you never take the opportunity to reach out. I bought the book for entertainment; it has now become a cherished part of my library. Let it make a difference for you.

Rating:
Summary: the PERFECT summer read
Review: Start your beach season with this one, and no other piece of writing will come close to it.

Set on an island near Charleston, South Carolina, this book juxtaposes the ebbs and tides of strained family relationships and friendships against the background of the lifestyle of the native loggerhead turtles. The analogy is a quiet one whose applications do not escape the savvy reader: motherhood, childhood, independence, tradition, nature, leaving relatives behind, beating the odds, finding your home. The main characters are women of all ages, and the strong ones help the not-so-strong. Hindsight tells you that the plot-lines are somewhat predictable, but it just doesn't matter. The story will connect with you if you've ever visited Charleston and its nearby beaches. It will touch you if you're a romantic at heart. It will affirm your deepest beliefs if you consider yourself an environmentalist. It will scream volumes to you if you're in your 40s and are considering a career and/or lifestyle change. And you'd better find a comfortable place to spend the last 60 pages, 'cause you ain't goin' nowhere. As reviewer Harriet advises, you'd better have a full box of tissues next to you at that point. The most powerful novel I have read in a while. I'd give it 10 stars, if I could.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Southern Story
Review: The Beach House is a beautiful story of family, love, and reconnecting with one's past in order to move into a happy future.

Caretta Rutlidge left her South Carolina family and all its troubles behind when she was 18 years old. She moved to Chicago and worked her way high up the corporate ladder, never to enter into any meaningful relationships apart from her work.

Then, she gets a letter from her somewhat estranged mother pleading with her to come home. At the same time, she is layed off work and decides to go. This trip to the Beach House on a small Island off SC changes her life in ways she never imagined possible.

Lovie, her endearing and amazing mother, needs her more than she ever has. She wants to put to rest all of the family trauma from the past. Caretta found her father abusive and cruel, to his children and his wife, and Lovie begins to uncover the truth Caretta never could have seen as a child.

As her relationship with her mom becomes a loving and caring one, Caretta also meets a man who shows her what it feels to love. But will she have to go back to Chicago at some point to begin her life there all over again and leave this beautiful Summer behind?

There is also Toy Sooner, the young pregnant girl who is Lovie's live in helper/companion. Caretta bonds with her because she sees so much of her own self when she was 18. Toy's story also gets more intricate as the father of her child, an abusive musician, tries to reclaim her.

But of most significance is the story the Rutlidge family. Of Caretta and her reclamation of herself, of Lovie, who has so much to give and so much to teach, of Palmer, Caretta's brother who is turning into her father, and of the ties that make up a family. It shows us that not only can you go home again, in order to discover who you really are, you must.

Rating:
Summary: The Beach House by Mary Alice Monroe
Review: The Beach House is absolutely, without a doubt a keeper. I read this book in two days, I couldn't lay it down. I felt so drawn to the people in this book and the lifestyle of living on a beach. The information about the Loggerhead turtles was very interesting, and the volunteers that help them to survive. I really enjoyed this book, and will probably read it again.

Rating:
Summary: Coming Home
Review: The Beach House, by Mary Alice Monroe, is a story about family and the strangled relationships that often exist within them. Mother and daughter, Olivia and Caretta Rutledge, are from upper crust Charleston, live in an old mansion, have a beach house on the Isle of Palms, and for all appearances, have charmed lives. However, underneath all the glamour lies a history of anger, repression, and violence. That the two women chose totally different ways to cope with the disfunction in their family wrenches them apart for twenty years and it is only when Olivia is old and dying, that Cara forces herself to return.
Caretta, a successful and self-made business woman in Chicago, comes home to visit at the beach house on the Isle of Palms and finds what her previous life has been missing: love, affection, trust, companionship, family. In only a short summer, she forms a new family with her mother, a young pregnant teenager and the Turtle Team, a group who monitors and protects Loggerhead Sea Turtle nests. Her hesitance at first grows into wonder as she observes her first nest of hatchlings in the South Carolina moonlight.
There is also a romantic element that is good enough to make you happy for the couple and hope for their future. In the end, a hurricane swipes the island and forces the realization of just how much it all means.
This is not a deep or philosophical book but the story of human contact and the need for love and understanding make for a good read. The turtle storyline is informative and interesting as well as consciousness raising. A good book for mothers and daughters whose relationships need work and a perfect one for reading on the beach.

Rating:
Summary: A book of reconciliation
Review: The lesson--it is never to late to make things right with the important people in your life. As Monroe superimposes the life cycle of the endangered loggerhead turtle on the life cycle of the heroic characters, she reveals the human connection between natural instinct and the sacrifices mothers make to protect their offspring. The misunderstood mother in this text has more than one interesting secret to reveal. As usual, Monroe's characters are people we would love to be friends with, and the situations in which she places them are real to many of us. I highly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Love, Pain and the Whole Damned Thing Called Life.
Review: The South has always presented a plethora of opportunity for writers. Moving forward into the 21st century, yet caught in a gossemer web of 18th century ideals, Southerners are great fodder for writers who dare to dip below the stereotypical notion of grits, drawled words and sweet as a magnolia charm.

In The Beach House, Mary Alice Monroe (yes, she's a Southern lady with those two first names)brings an interesting tale to print. It is nothing short of the tale of the cycle of life.

The protagonist, Carretta, returns home for a visit after an odd letter from her mother requesting such. Little does Carertta realize that she is returning to her roots just as the female loggerhead turtle returns to nest. Back on the Isle of Palms
the story of a Southern family's life plays itself out. Love, infidelity, preserving the family name and reputation are just part of the unfolding drama.

Palmer, Caretta's brother proves to have become the father that his sister and he (and his mother) despised.

Olivia, Caretta's mother, is not the prim, proper Southern lady that everyone thought that she was after all.

And Toy, a young, poor, ignorant girl who manages to get herself pregnant with a less than desirable rock and roll wannabe finds her way into the story.

And then there is Brett Beauchamps...high school football jock and all around God's gift to the women of Wando High School.

All of these people and a host of friends begin to discover some of the insightful "ahas!" of life in an interesting and moving story.

Young readers will probably not appreciate this work as much as those who are middle aged or elderly. It takes a certain amount of living to appreciate the ironies that we all share in the various paths we take on our life journey.

This is a wonderful book for summer reading. It is even more so if it causes the reader time for self reflecting.