The Summer Girls is the quinessential beach read. It's 377 pages, but reads much faster. Each character, and there are no more than a handful, is distinct, the plot moves quickly, and it's even set at the beach.
Dora, Carson, and Harper are half-sisters who have not seen one another for the better part of a decade until their grandmother summons them to her lowcountry house, Sea Breeze, to celebrate her 80th birthday. Dora, the oldest, is in the midst of a divorce and uncertain, at best, how to handle her autistic son. Carson has recently broken up with her boyfriend, lost her job, and is a borderline alcoholic, while Harper is spinning her wheels as her ice-queen-mother's personal assistant at a New York City publishing house. Different mothers, different lives, and now way too much togetherness.
I bought what Mary Alice Monroe was selling for roughly 300 pages. The last quarter of the book, though, sort of fell apart for me. All of the storylines save Carson's seem to vanish, and hers goes from improbable to utterly absurd. In the end, I just wasn't a fan.
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