Women's Fiction, Family & Friendship - Fiction, Crimes - Fiction

The Beach Trees

Name: The Beach Trees
Author: Karen White
ISBN: 9780451233073

by Karen White

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Overview

From the bestselling author of After the Rain, Sea Change, and The Color of Light...

From the time she was twelve, Julie Holt knew what a random tragedy can do to a family. At that tender age, her little sister disappeared-never to be found. It was a loss that slowly eroded the family bonds she once relied on. As an adult with a prestigious job in the arts, Julie meets a struggling artist who reminds her so much of her sister, she can't help feeling protective. It is a friendship that begins a long and painful process of healing for Julie, leading her to a house on the Gulf Coast, ravaged by hurricane Katrina, and to stories of family that take her deep into the past.

About the Author, Karen White

Karen White is the bestselling author of numerous novels including After the Rain, Sea Change, Falling Home, On Folly Beach, and The Color of Light, as well as the Tradd Street novels including The Strangers on Montagu Street and The Girl on Legare Street.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

White (On Folly Beach) spins a convoluted story of unexplained disappearances and family secrets stretching from New Orleans to Biloxi, Miss. Five years after Katrina, New Yorker Julie Holt arrives in New Orleans with a mission: she's got a deed to a Biloxi beach house and surprise custody of Beau, her late friend Monica's five-year-old son, and she intends to introduce Beau to the extended family he's never met. Soon, with the help of Monica's grandmother, Aimee, and brother, Trey, Julie begins to piece together exactly why Monica left her home and family, and that Monica's family's secrets run deep and murky—they involve a murder, a famous painter, and a disappearance—which Julie can relate to, as her own sister was kidnapped when she was a child. Told in alternating chapters—Julie in the present, Aimee in the 1950s—as both women search for answers to their respective mysteries, the novel is slow moving and more confusingly teased out than the plot warrants, with White's descriptions of the gulf coast—and New Orleans in particular—offering more reason to keep reading than the less than expert treatment of the families' tormented pasts. (May)