Beach Reads

Let your body (not your brain) do the vegetating this summer and take some mind-tingling books along to the land of surf and sand. To help you make the most of the lazy days ahead, we've rounded up a group of fast-paced but substantial reads—in categories from memoir to mystery—that are just right for the steamiest season of the year. So browse the titles below, take your pick and get some exercise this summer—mental, that is.

WOMEN'S FICTION
REVIEW BY CLAIRE GERUS

Adriana Trigiani's enchanting new novel will find a warm welcome from every reader who has encountered a fork in the road to love and taken the more perilous path.

Lucia Sartori is a dynamic young Italian-American woman living in Greenwich Village in the early 1950s. She loves her close-knit family, her church and her job as apprentice to a designer on the fast track at B. Altman's department store. For Lucia, her work as a seamstress is more than a job: it's her passion.

Lucia is engaged to Dante DeMartino, a devoted, if unexciting, young man who bears a strong resemblance to her favorite movie star, Don Ameche. She has overlooked many of Dante's faults until she is challenged one night by Dante's old-fashioned, controlling mother, who insists that her prospective daughter-in-law give up her beloved career as a seamstress and stay at home after the wedding. Shouldn't her life revolve around her new husband? Isn't this the existence every Italian girl aspires to?

For Lucia, the answer is a resounding "No, never!" She ends the engagement and sees her life take an irrevocable turn with the arrival of the mysterious, devastatingly attractive John Talbot. The shift from a secure, surefooted lifestyle to one in which Lucia must constantly cope with shifting sands heralds the beginning of a journey that ultimately reveals what will truly bring her happiness.

Trigiani, a television writer who first came to the attention of readers with her popular Big Stone Gap series, has created in Lucia a strong-willed, yet vulnerable heroine whose innocence, determination and optimism charm everyone who crosses her path. While the story ostensibly focuses on Lucia's romantic hijinks, it is, even more, a testament to the power of familial love and friendship. Readers may find the decidedly wholesome backdrop to the story surprising (remember, we're back in the 1950s). Perhaps that is Trigiani's greatest gift to her reader: the recognition that devotion, loyalty and forgiveness will ultimately win the day.


AMERICAN CULTURE
REVIEW BY MARTIN BRADY

In The Mercury 13, journalist and Mount Holyoke College professor Martha Ackmann serves up a fascinating account of the efforts by women to become astronauts in the early days of the U.S. space program. With NASA and other government officials firmly ensconced in the good ol' boys club, there was never any doubt that the trainees for the initial Mercury space-flight missions would be exclusively men. Yet, as Ackmann shows, a staunch and able group of females, led by ace test pilot Jerrie Cobb, underwent the same physical and mental testing as later heroes Alan B. Shepard and John Glenn and might well have been excellent astronauts.

Truth to tell, there were certain physical characteristics—for example, lower body weight—that led NASA executives Dr. Randy Lovelace and Air Force Brigadier General Donald Flickinger to believe that females might offer some advantages over their male counterparts. Eventually, 13 women emerged as frontline candidates for Mercury missions. On a wing and a prayer, they soldiered on, hoping that NASA's powerful all-male hierarchy would see their value to the program. But Vice President Lyndon Johnson, then the titular head of NASA, nipped these dreams in the bud. Not even a series of congressional hearings on the topic could sway the men in power.

Ackmann provides interesting details on the lives of the would-be female astronauts and their battle to win a chance at making history. Besides being an excellent volume in the category of women's studies, The Mercury 13 also serves to fill a critical gap in the history of NASA and (wo)manned space flight. A foreword is provided by ABC News correspondent Lynn Sherr, who was a semi-finalist in the now-defunct journalist-in-space competition.


FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
REVIEW BY AMY SCRIBNER

Warning: Jeanne Ray's novel Eat Cake is so much fun that it easily lends itself to silly baking metaphors like "sweet as chocolate" or "smooth as icing."

Don't worry, though. We won't use those cliches here. To do so would not do justice to this book, which—although boisterously funny—is also a poignant account of the increasingly common struggle Baby Boomers face in caring for aging parents.

Ruth Hopson has her hands full. In addition to a moody teenage daughter, her mother moves in with the family after a robber breaks into her own home. Ruth manages her stress by picturing herself in her favorite place, which happens to be the center of a warm, freshly baked Bundt cake. When that doesn't do the trick, she actually bakes a cake, her other favorite stress-buster. The Hopson household is never wanting for a fresh almond apricot pound cake or lemon chiffon.

But then the unthinkable happens. Actually, two unthinkables: Ruth's husband Sam loses his job as a hospital administrator, and her long-absent father breaks both arms and asks to move in while he recuperates.

Caring for two elderly parents is hard enough, but the hardship is compounded by the fact that Ruth's father and mother have barely spoken in decades. And her suddenly unemployed husband decides he wants to take time off from his job in order to "find himself."

Since physically flinging herself into a cake is not a realistic possibility, Ruth does the only thing she can think of to keep the family afloat: she attempts to sell her incredible cakes to local restaurants. After years as a fulltime mother and homemaker, starting her own business is a daunting—make that terrifying—step.

Jeanne Ray, author of the bestsellers Julie and Romeo and Step-Ball-Change and mother of acclaimed novelist Ann Patchett, deftly evokes the bittersweet parent-child relationship, acknowledging the alternating pangs of love and annoyance that make it so difficult and so ultimately worthwhile. In Ray's able hands, Ruth is never a caricature of a frazzled housewife—she is a capable, complicated woman with whom one yearns to share a piece of cake and a good laugh.

And that makes Eat Cake as sweetly satisfying as meringue. Sorry, we couldn't resist.


MEMOIR
REVIEW BY ANNE BARTLETT

Of course, we remember the Big Things: the first kiss, the first real love, the first job, the first child. But we also measure our lives through our recollection of smaller pleasures: that sunrise service on the beach; the sleek dress that made you feel like a grown-up for the first time; that perfect meal in that perfect trattoria in Rome.

Author Hilary Liftin's smaller pleasures almost always involve refined sugar. She measures her young life in candy corn, peanut butter cups and conversation hearts. Candy and Me: A Love Story is her bon-bon of a book about growing up with a sweet tooth. Liftin has had an ordinary enough life—suburban girlhood, good college, a series of slightly tiresome boyfriends and jobs before finding the right one of each. But her psychic world is truly Candyland. As a child, she bonds with her brother while she eats confectioners sugar from a Dixie cup. She has her first serious romance during a summer that she's fixated on Junior Mints. In the process of dumping her, a later boyfriend tries to placate her with Bottle Caps—a particularly cruel gesture, because they're her favorite candy.

Along the way, she educates us about the great universe of candy production. Did you know that fudge was invented when someone made an error making another candy? That Necco manufactures more than 8 billion conversation hearts during the Valentine season? I didn't, but I do now. Liftin writes with the light charm and humor appropriate to her topic. Life may be difficult, but candy is always pretty dandy. And whatever your craving, growing up is about learning to balance the sweet and the sour.


SUSPENSE
REVIEW BY GREGORY HARRIS

Thrillers often explore espionage and intrigue from the inside, but Janette Turner Hospital's new novel Due Preparations for the Plague plunges the reader into the shadowy world of terrorism and intelligence from an outsider's perspective. The result is a mesmerizing tale of grief, mystery and revelation.

Due Preparations opens as Lowell, a house painter, tries to cope with the approaching anniversary of his mother's death in a skyjacking. As the date nears, the reader sympathizes with Lowell's grief and anxiety. Already troubled by anger and guilt, Lowell is further shaken by unwanted phone calls from Samantha, who was among a group of children released from the doomed flight. Now a member of a support group for survivors of the incident, she pesters Lowell for any information he might have.

Lowell's troubles expand when his estranged father, a former intelligence agent, is killed in a traffic accident. Information he leaves his son sets Lowell and Samantha on the path to learning more about the tragedy that marked both their lives. An intense, riveting reading experience follows that explores the overlapping worlds of national security and international terrorism.

As civilians—and proxies for the reader—Lowell and Samantha have a tinge of the sinister about them. But Hospital skillfully imparts in them the idealism that drives many to enter the nation's intelligence services, as well as the isolation and loneliness that are the toll of a lifetime in clandestine activity.


TRAVEL
REVIEW BY LYNN HAMILTON

People are already making comparisons between A Year in Provence and Mañana, Mañana. But, at the risk of committing travel writing heresy, some readers may like Mañana better. It's often funnier, grittier and more textured than Mayle's best-selling book.

Scottish sheep farmers Ellie and Peter Kerr decide to risk their financial future on a citrus orchard in Mallorca, a beautiful resort island off the coast of Spain. Peter Kerr paints a precise and compelling portrait of his adopted home, from the postman's morning cognac to the row of olive trees on the hillside, to the family fishing boats dwarfed by the yachts of affluent expats. With a few judiciously chosen details, he captures the Mallorcan landscape and character.

Kerr's reports on the specialties of Mallorcan cuisine will make your mouth water. But his greatest achievement may be his ability to convey the quirks and nobility of his neighbors. A hilarious scene involves a neighbor dubbed "SeŇora Breadteeth." She shows up at the Kerr's farm one day with her niece and tries to get the Kerrs to hire the girl as a housemaid. She also offers them her sturdy nephews as farm hands.

The Kerrs have some trouble convincing Breadteeth that they are not wealthy just because they are foreign, that they are used to doing their own farm work, and that they can't afford to do it any other way. At last, Breadteeth sighs with comprehension and says, "So you're really just peasants, too?"

It's the fact that the Kerrs do have to make their own living off the land that truly connects them to the Mallorcan community. They experience the same risks and fears as their neighbors, which takes them deeper into rural Spain than most travel writers—and rich vacationers—will ever go.


Claire Gerus writes from Norwich, Connecticut.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in South Florida.

Gregory Harris is a writer and editor living in Indianapolis.

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