Beach books: When it’s too hot for Tolstoy

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End of the ‘Innocence’
Evie, narrator of Kathleen Tessaro’s “Innocence” (William Morrow, $25), is an instructor at a community class for the dramatic arts. The student body is alcoholic, hopeless, or both; Evie has stagnated, waiting out the days with her young son in rented rooms. Her life gets a jolt when she is visited by the ghost of Robbie, a girl she roomed with when they were both 19 and in London for an acting workshop.

Flashback to 1987: Evie is greeted at the door of her London flat by Robbie, a juggernaut of Auntie-Mame-style dramatics who hauls Evie along for her escapades. On being an actress, Robbie says, “You want to be someone else and then you are and people applaud.” Her bluster is a thin veneer over her sad desperation, a façade that Evie soon penetrates.

INNOCENCE
The 18-year-old Evie’s voice is relayed as it was then, not through the filter of the sadder-but-wiser adult who narrates the present-day passages. As a student, she is self-centered, naively optimistic, and sweetly ignorant. Tessaro then slowly closes the 14-year gap in her history. The younger Evie falls in with Jake, the impossibly tall, dark and handsome bad boy, setting off a string of events that leads to her eventual withdrawal from life to insulate herself from such chaos. Robbie’s apparition takes on the Shakespearean role of the long-dead sage manifested to enlighten the living; she makes Evie relearn how to take chances with a new man.

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Tessaro’s prose runs easily from light to heavy, like a skilled pianist effortlessly incorporating all 88 keys. The story reels you in slowly at first, but the author uses subtle tricks of misdirection to keep you from piecing together the whole picture till the very end. Early scenes with Jake have a tendency to slip into almost-Harlequin schmaltz, but somehow that’s part of the charm.

Hijinks ‘Society’
The Colshannon family of Sarah Mason’s “Society Girls” (Ballantine, $13) is a less-despondent, more-British version of J. D. Salinger’s illustrious, quirky Glass family. Narrator Clemmie quips that she’s got “three brothers and a sister who was thrown in at the last minute” (not to mention hanger-on orphaned Sam), and they all have a propensity for drink and/or trouble. Mason’s first novel showcased Holly Colshannon, and this, her sophomore effort, focuses on young Clemmie.

SOCIETY GIRLS
Clemmie has lost her co-worker boyfriend and her job in one fell swoop. When he blames her for a career “cock-up” of his own, she has the temerity to drop the blame, and a scalding cup of coffee, back in his lap, and is sacked. She is temporarily languishing at her parents’ house in Cornwall when Emma, the social diarist at Holly’s Bristol paper, abruptly disappears.

The sisters run across her drop-dead-gorgeous fiancé Charlie (Emma has never mentioned an engagement) and the mystery thickens. Holly’s been flailing for story ideas since her last exposé, and decides that investigating Emma’s inexplicable cold feet will make great copy. Thus begins a madcap adventure that ends with the Colshannons secreting Emma away to the southern coast of France, which Mason depicts so lavishly and lovingly that you can almost smell the ocean and taste the cheese.

Clemmie is sartorially hopeless and endlessly self-deprecating — charming run-on sentences spill out of her. The rest of the colorful clan is similarly entertaining, including her barmy actress mother with her menagerie of misfit animals. The dramatis personae are eccentric without ever quite sinking into caricature, and there are no real bad guys, only an assortment of unfortunate misunderstandings. Mason provides a great selection of little plot twists: some you can easily suss out, and a few that are entirely unforeseeable, and thus keep you from getting bored.

Kim Rollins is a writer in Seattle.

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