"Review: 'The Beach at Summerly,' Beatriz Williams"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Beach at Summerly, Beatriz Williams

July 24, 2023

 

Full Disclosure: Beatriz Williams is my daughter-in-law.

 

“One day You’ll thank me for all I’ve done.

One day you’ll realize just how much you owe me…”

                                                                                                                Olive speaking to Emilia, May 1954

 

Beatriz, a New York Times best-selling novelist, has just completed her 15^th novel. As well, she has co-written four other novels with two friends and fellow novelists: Lauren Willig and Karen White.

 

In this, like Our Woman in Moscow, Beatriz uses the Cold War as background, alternating between 1946 and 1954. It is, in part, a love story, especially the love between Emilia Winthrop, the daughter of Summerly’s caretaker and Shep Peabody, son of the estate’s owner. Despite her father working for his father, they have been close friends since childhood summers spent on Winthrop Island. Separated by war for four years, they are in their early 20s when the story opens in 1946. Then separated for eight years, they find each other again, in May 1954. 

 

But it is also a story of espionage, of Soviet spies who have infiltrated the United States. Among them are Olive Rainsford, Mr. Peabody’s sister-in-law, who, after several years of living in Europe has come back to Winthrop Island with her three young children, to live in Summerley’s guest cottage. Emilia gets a job looking after Olive’s children in the evening, while their mother is in her attic “translating” books. Sumner Fox – who played an FBI agent in Our Woman in Moscow and now works for the CIA – appears disguised as a writer interested in colonial history. His agency is suspicious of Olive; he reminds Emilia of the Communist menace: “The Soviets play the game like a chess match, you see. Several moves ahead.”

 

And it is a story about betrayal, loyalty, and redemption, seen through the relationship between Olive and Emilia, different people with different principles. Olive betrayed her country. When confronted about transmitting classified information, she tells Emilia: “I would rather betray my country than my principles. It takes guts to betray your country. To betray your principles is a moral failing.”  As the government’s main witness, Emilia betrayed her friendship with Olive. Emilia’s loyalties are to her family and to Shep. Olive’s loyalties are to her belief in Communism, and the better world she believes it offers. Redemption comes later. 

 

As in many of her books, historical figures have bit roles: An appearance is made by Allen Dulles, and there are references to Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth and to Patricia Highsmith, whose 1950 novel Strangers on a Train had been made into a successful movie by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. There is much more in this novel – the sense of grief-stricken sadness and euphoric relief in 1946 – the devastation of the Depression and the mourning for those lost in the War, but then the relief felt by survivors, and of how the years had matured and changed those who went off to fight as well as those who stayed home.

 

As in all her books, Beatriz provides characters we will long remember and whom we hope to meet again in future stories.