Saturday, July 12, 2014

The Summer Wind by Mary Alice Monroe

Hmmm....I've read one of Mary Alice Monroe's books before and I liked it enough to read the sequel.  So I was excited to get this advanced copy from NetGalley because I remember her as being a great beach read.
So I started the book with high hopes.  After about 50 pages, I started getting confused.  I felt like maybe I had read the book before.  After 75 pages, I was convinced I had read this book.
Thank God for Goodreads.  I went back and looked through my "read" history and found the book I had read.  It was "Swimming Lessons" and it was published in 2007.
So now I knew this couldn't be the same book, but the entire time I read it, I was feeling a little bored, because I felt like I knew how it was going to end.
Elderly women living in beach cottages, teaching their grown children and/or grandchildren life lessons, grown women with absentee alcoholic fathers, emotional connections to sea life, unhappy marriages due to following the rules of the southern belle.  All of the same story lines are present, just tweaked a little bit.
That isn't to say that it isn't a good book.  Both books are easy beach reads.  But it just felt a little like re-reading the same book, when it wasn't a five star book worth re-reading, so I actually felt a little hoodwinked.
After a little research, I discovered this is the second book in a three book series.  If I had nothing better to do, I might read the third book just to see how it all ends out, but I feel like there wouldn't be many surprises.



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