Reach the Beach

by Lara Johnson

A young woman embarks on a journey of self-discovery in this engaging, introspective story about love and growing up.




About the novel:

A classic novel written in a contemporary voice, Reach the Beach begins with the narrator’s return home after only one semester at college. This decision is not by choice exactly but rather by divine design – Alex is told in a dream that if she returns home, she will meet her true love.

Alex soon learns not everything goes according to plan, in this engaging, introspective story about love and growing up.

222 pages, Paperback

First published February 21, 2012

About the author

Lara Johnson has an MBA in Finance from George Washington University, a BS in Mass Communications, with a major in Advertising from Virginia Commonwealth University and an AA in Liberal Arts from Northern Virginia Community College. She has worked as a financial analyst and in marketing/advertising positions at various companies in different industries for a number of years. She was born and grew up in Loudoun County, Virginia and now lives outside New York City.

In 2022, she published a chapbook: A star 3 trees and a venus flytrap which consists primarily of aphorisms that tell a philosophy.

In 2017, she compiled a collection of columns describing the events of Bluemont, a small town located at the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia, into a book entitled: A decade of Bluemont News. The weekly columns written by her mother, Evelyn Porterfield Johnson, cover the years 1969-1979 and originally appeared in the Loudoun Times-Mirror newspaper. In 2025, she published the weekly columns into two books: 1969-1974 Bluemont News and 1975-1979 Bluemont News.

In 2012, she published an autobiographical fiction novel entitled: Reach the Beach.