The Vacationers by Emma Straub

The Vacationers by Emma Straub

Read by Kristen Sieh

6 hours 39 minutes

Published May 2014 by Riverhead Books

Publisher's Summary: 

For the Posts, a two-week trip to the Balearic island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends is a celebration: Franny and Jim are observing their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and their daughter, Sylvia, has graduated from high school. The sunlit island, its mountains and beaches, its tapas and tennis courts, also promise an escape from the tensions simmering at home in Manhattan. But all does not go according to plan: over the course of the vacation, secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds are exacerbated.

This is a story of the sides of ourselves that we choose to show and those we try to conceal, of the ways we tear each other down and build each other up again, and the bonds that ultimately hold us together. With wry humor and tremendous heart, Emma Straub delivers a richly satisfying story of a family in the midst of a maelstrom of change, emerging irrevocably altered yet whole.

My Thoughts: 

Look at the cover, read the summary - now you know exactly what you're going to get with this one. It's absolutely a book to read on the beach (hence the reason I chose to listen to it in February - oh, well!). It has that summer lightness that's perfect for a warm, sunny day and endings to its storylines that are exactly what you'd expect. 

Several reviewers said you feel like you know these people - I'd say that's probably because you've met them before in other books. Not literally, this isn't a sequel. But we've met the boomer parents who are experiencing some mid-life crisis, the teenage daughter that spends most of her days moping away, the gay couple who want a child, the girlfriend no one likes. If you're going to start from there, you'd better bring something more to your story. Straub has. Her characters can be witty, catty, and sympathetic in ways I wasn't expecting. 

Mallorca, a place I've certainly heard of but never really thought about, comes alive. Even before I looked at pictures of the island, I could picture the Franny struggling with her stick-shift rental up and down the winding hills, visualize the isolated beach coves, and imagine the isolation of a home in the hills that's only minutes from town. And the food, my goodness did Straub make me want to eat, but more importantly to cook in the way that Franny does. Franny and I do have that in common - she shows her love through food, through cooking for her family and I love to do that as well. 

After telling you that the characters are somewhat stereotypical and the ending is largely predictable, I can still recommend this book because I know that you'll get exactly what you're expecting from it. And sometimes that's exactly what you need. 

Sunset Beach by Mary Kay Andrews - A Guest Review

Sunset Beach by Mary Kay Andrews
Published May 2019 by St. Martin's Press
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:
Drue Campbell’s life is adrift. Out of a job and down on her luck, life doesn’t seem to be getting any better when her estranged father, Brice Campbell, a flamboyant personal injury attorney, shows up at her mother’s funeral after a twenty-year absence. Worse, he’s remarried – to Drue’s eighth grade frenemy, Wendy, now his office manager. And they’re offering her a job.

It seems like the job from hell, but the offer is sweetened by the news of her inheritance – her grandparents’ beach bungalow in the sleepy town of Sunset Beach, a charming but storm-damaged eyesore now surrounded by waterfront McMansions.

With no other prospects, Drue begrudgingly joins the firm, spending her days screening out the grifters whose phone calls flood the law office. Working with Wendy is no picnic either. But when a suspicious death at an exclusive beach resort nearby exposes possible corruption at her father’s firm, she goes from unwilling cubicle rat to unwitting investigator, and is drawn into a case that may – or may not – involve her father. With an office romance building, a decades-old missing persons case re-opened, and a cottage in rehab, one thing is for sure at Sunset Beach: there’s a storm on the horizon.

My Thoughts:
My sister has long been a fan of Mary Kay Andrews' books and has read and reviewed books by Andrews previously for me. When this book showed up in my mailbox, I knew immediately that I needed to put it in her hands. My sister lives on the banks of a river and I could just imagine her sitting on her dock reading this one as I looked at that cover. Here are my sister's thoughts on this book. Thank you, sis, for your review!

Guest Review:
As a fan of Ms Andrews' writing I was looking forward to reading her latest book, Sunset Beach. My general rule of thumb is to put a book down that hasn’t captured my attention by the end of the first chapter. I made an exception on Sunset Beach because of my fondness for Ms. Andrews' storytelling. I found the the story slow to develop and the characters difficult to relate to.

The primary figure, Drue, returns home to Sunset Beach to restart her life. From there the storyline pulls in several directions, with too many secondary characters. The storylines, while slow to develop, felt rushed to the finish and felt very disconnected to me. I was left waiting for more closure.

There is mystery, suspense, family drama, and a love story.

I will happily pick up Ms Andrew’s next book because of previous reading pleasure; but for me, Sunset Beach was a bust.