The Summer of Lost and Found by Mary Alice Monroe

 

In The Summer of Lost and Found, Mary Alice Monroe, the Queen of Low Country Fiction, takes readers back to the Beach House of the Rutledge family. While I feared authors would be writing novels with coronavirus plots, I found that Monroe handled the story line with a calm but firm hand incorporating wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing.

Linnea Rutledge, Lovie’s granddaughter, just lost her job at the aquarium because of the coronavirus pandemic. Fortunately, her aunt Cara owns the Beach House, and she assures Linnea that paying rent will cease during these difficult times. In exchange, Linnea will help Cara with her daughter Hope as husband David has just returned from England and must quarantine, although soon he has all the symptoms of the virus.

Linnea’s new boyfriend Gordon is struggling to get back to the Isle of Palms, but he is having difficulty getting out of England because of the pandemic. To complicate things, Linnea’s former boyfriend John is visiting his mother who lives next door to Linnea.

To say Linnea soon becomes confused about all her feelings regarding Gordon and John is an understatement. Too add to the growing pandemic concerns, she finds herself temporarily housing cousin Hope while her dad quarantines, her friend Annabelle who has no family to help during the pandemic, and her brother Cooper, who is fresh off of quarantine in his parents’ house where he is going crazy.

Six-year-old Hope helps bridge the gap between Linnea and her “lost” love John, starting first with the paper airplanes he sends down from the carriage house where he is quarantining. He and Linnea had a bad breakup, and he realizes he made a big mistake in letting Linnea go. With the paper airplane notes to Hope and fun games starting with leaving items in hiding places, Linnea has “found” her feelings for John softening and changing. To complicate matters, Gordon is back on US soil, and Linnea becomes overwhelmed with emotions and concerns.

Nobody handles complex family situations and relationships better than Mary Alice Monroe. She is one of my handful of go-to authors for “beach reads.” The late Dorothea Benton Frank called Monroe’s writing “sensitive and true.” Both of those qualities were desperately needed in a book capturing life during the pandemic.

This is Mary Alice Monroe’s 24th novel. Monroe is a conservationist and a turtle lady in South Carolina, where she lives with her husband on the Isle of Palms, a small barrier island just outside of Charleston. They also have a hideaway in the mountains somewhere in North Carolina. Her Beach House novel, the first in the Rutledge family series, was recently made into a Hallmark movie starring Andie MacDowell and Chad Michael Murray.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting March 2, 2021.

I would like to thank Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.