Beach books: When it’s too hot for Tolstoy

Bloomin’ disappointment
Rebecca Wells’ Ya-Ya Sisterhood, encompassing three generations of Southern women and three volumes of fiction, is practically an American institution.  Her latest, “Ya-Yas in Bloom,” (Harper Collins, $25), is, unfortunately, the weakest of the trilogy, like a third cup of tea she’s tried to wring from an already sodden bag.  It lacks the solidity of Siddalee’s narration that was the heart of “Divine Secrets,” and the consistent voice of “Little Altars Everywhere.”

“Ya-Yas in Bloom” is a patchwork of vignettes that fill in what few gaps remain in Ya-Ya history. By fleshing out the backstory of Vivi’s devout fire-and-brimstone mother, Wells unearths the origins of the damage that Vivi later inflicts on her own children; she illustrates how human frailties can be passed down through generations of women like an heirloom jewel.  Wells also chronicles the story of how the Ya-Yas first came to be united, at the age of four (Teensy and Vivi met at the pediatrician’s when Teensy shoved a pecan up her nose).

The language is off-key, sometimes feeling grossly oversimplified.  The little girls’ stories have the flavor of fairy tales, peppered with phrases such as “not one bit.”  They feel worn smooth by retelling, as they surely were, which makes them ring less than true.  Previously Wells has proven herself a master at conveying the real perspective of children: their anxiety, wonder, and ridiculous aspirations, but this deftness rarely comes through here (the “Buckaroo” chapter is the bittersweet exception.)

Similarly, 11-year-old Siddalee’s rhapsodic travelogue about the family’s trip to see the Beatles in Houston reads like teenage wishful thinking: too breathless, too many exclamation points.  Gone are her parents’ explosive tempers and, with them, any dramatic tension. 

Another chapter showcases unidimensional bit player Myrtis Spevey, who is too overblown to take seriously and yet not funny enough to laugh at. This collection simply isn’t a fitting coda for the series; it deserves better.

‘Balancing’ Act
Eileen Rendahl’s attorney heroine Alissa kicks off “Balancing in High Heels” (Downtown Press, $13) by demolishing a fax machine when her estranged husband demands an immediate divorce.

Subsequent anger-management counseling goes swimmingly until she slings a chair at her therapist.  Alissa acknowledges that she needs a drastic change in her life, and relocates to the questionable bosom of her family in San Jose, although this means struggling not to revert into a child, or, worse, transmogrify into her mother.

In her fledgling private practice, Alissa’s assigned to defend “teacher/stripper/vigilante” Sheila, accused of duct-taping an accountant to a chair while her lingerie-clad cohorts rifled through his filing cabinet.  At the police station, Alissa encounters Sheila’s square-jawed, green-eyed, arresting (in more ways than one!) officer. 

The strippers have formed a loose coalition that funnels their deep-set aggravation at a selfish world into small acts of guerrilla defiance.  Their bent for retaliation spreads to the general female populace (their ubiquity creating an “I am Spartacus” situation where individual acts can’t be linked to individual women), escalating until one day when Alissa’s mother smashes an errant parker’s car window out with her cane.

Rendahl tends to break up the flow of her dialog (which, in the romantic-comedy genre, should snap) with long expository sentences after every direct quote, creating start-and-stop, clunky conversations. In one exchange that takes place while two women are shoe-shopping, the spoken lines are effectively hidden between the brand names of the sneakers Alissa considers.  While uneven (there’s too much ugly reality for this tale to be farce, and vice-versa) the book is an intriguing primer on the anger that pervades this modern road-rage society — when to contain fury, and how to channel it.  Its moral:  “It takes no courage to throw a temper tantrum.”  Oh, and turning into your mother might not be so bad after all.

East Meets South
At the outset of “Dixieland Sushi” (Downtown Press, $13) a flabbergasted Jen Nakamura Taylor receives an engraved invitation from her cousin, the runner-up to Miss Arkansas, inviting Jen to attend her wedding to Jen’s girlhood crush.  Determined not to endure the humiliation of attending the wedding solo, Jen conscripts her devilishly handsome English co-worker Riley to accompany her on a road trip from Chicago to the Deep South.  Riley is unfortunately tied to a girlfriend who conveniently begins two-timing him two weeks prior to the cousin’s rehearsal dinner, hence he tags along as a temptingly free man.

Unfortunately, Cara Lockwood’s second novel is thereafter as eminently predictable and unimaginatively executed as a paint-by-numbers canvas. 

Riley is said to resemble both Colin Firth and Hugh Grant, making him a Bridget Jones twofer.   (Jen is irritatingly ignorant of British lingo, prompting Riley to solemnly explain to her that “bird” means girl and “pissed” means drunk.)  Jen’s sensei (American-born) Japanese mother “hilariously” still mixes up English colloquialisms, telling Jen not to be a “smart alan,” and reminding her that “the early horse gets the worm.”  Each chapter has an epigraph from “Karate Kid” mentor Mr. Miyagi, which while meant to be cute, only underscores Jen’s ignorance of most anything authentically Japanese.

The storyline rapidly devolves into a Frankensteinian blend of shopworn sitcom cliches — Jen’s car breaks down with hackneyed plumes of smoke billowing from under the hood, she and Riley must check into the only hotel room available and discover it has but one bed, the hunky groom turns out to be a vast disappointment, etc.  “Dixieland Sushi” bills itself as a novel about being different, but most elements of the story will be dully familiar to anyone who owns a television.

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