Before On Ocean Boulevard, I’d not read anything by Mary Alice Monroe, best-selling author of the Beach House series, because I normally don’t read romance. About thirty pages in, I thought this is like reading a Hallmark Channel movie. Turns out Monroe’s best-selling novel The Beach House is also a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie.
The setting is Charleston and South Carolina beaches. There are two protagonists and two romances. Linnea, a twenty-something environmentalist who was named after the famous zoologist Linnaeus, returns to her home in South Carolina, having lost both her job and her boyfriend in California. Cara, her aunt and an adoptive mother of a four-year-old abandoned immigrant, contemplates a second marriage. Apart from the romances, the plot organizes around the enterprise of saving sea turtles, an avocation of the smallish beach community with which most of the women characters identify (in real life, the author is a conservation activist). Another angle is that Linnea physically resembles her deceased grandmother, the matriarch who maybe steers events from beyond, and Linnea coming back home is like the mama turtles returning to lay eggs.
This is a tale in which men are romantic, mostly listen to women, and sincerely apologize to them when their small flaws are revealed. The women are sisters in solidarity. There is some drama, but it’s manageable. In the end, Cara and Linnea find love in the size and shape that suit them and end up in the beach house of their respective dreams. If you want to read a Hallmark movie, this book will do it for you. The author is very good at what she does and the book received superhigh reviews from her fans on Amazon. Here’s what Book Reporter says:
https://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/on-ocean-boulevard/about
