The Beach Trees
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5.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of the Tradd Street novels comes the story of one woman’s journey into a secret past—and a life she never expected on the ravaged coast of Biloxi, Mississippi...
Working at an auction house in New York, Julie Holt meets a struggling artist and single mother who reminds her very much of her missing younger sister. Monica Guidry paints a vivid picture of her Southern family through stories, but never says why or how she lost contact with them. And she has another secret: a heart condition that will soon take her life.
Feeling as if she’s lost her sister a second time, Julie inherits from Monica an antique portrait—as well as custody of her young son. Taking him to Biloxi, Mississippi, to meet the family he’s never known, Julie discovers a connection of her own. The portrait, of an old Guidry relative, was done by her great-grandfather—and unlocks a surprising family history....
INCLUDES A READERS GUIDE AND AN EXCERPT OF DREAMS OF FALLING
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.
