Summer Rental by Mary Kay Andrews

Considering that, this is a book about women in their mid thirties, who are educated and worldly I had to say I was rather amazed at how Ms Andrews portrayed them.
We get to spend the month of August with best friends since elementary school—meet Julie, Ellis and Dorie who are spending the month in a beach house on the outer banks of North Caroline. A very diverse group of women that in “real life” may never bond as well as this group does. Add into the mix the sexy landlord Ty and a stray woman (Maryn, a ‘run-away’ from New Jersey) that Dorie picks up in a diner and we have the makings for either the perfect beach book or a slasher movie! Of course, what would a good beach read be without at least one of them hiding a secret…well how would you feel about at least 4 of them hiding something and one of them hiding something that could be deadly?
The idea behind this story, while is good one, it has been pretty much done to death and I hate to say it, done so much better. Don’t get me wrong, I adore the books of Mary Kay Andrews and have all of them on my shelf. Therefore, I was very excited to be allowed to read this as a pre-release. And this books starts out very strong, with Ms Andrews typical well written and drawn characters, each with a clear and distinctive voice. However, something happens about one third of the way through and the voices of each woman became one, and actually even Ty started sounding like one of the ‘girls’. In addition, when I say that I mean GIRL as in this group of mid thirty-something successful women start sounding like badly educated adolescents. Words like “dude” and “totally” were used on nearly every page and in every conceivable variation.

I understand that this is a brain candy beach read, so I tried to read this with that in mind, but after a while, the dialogue just got too painful, the action to childish and the outcome too obvious.

Definitely a book to grab from the library.