Reunion Beach: Stories Inspired by Dorothea Benton Frank is a collection of stories, essays, recipes, and poetry contributed by friends of the late Dorothea Benton Frank, several of whom happened to also be well-known, best-selling authors themselves. Elin Hilderbrand, Adriana Trigiani, Patti Callahan, and Mary Alice Monroe (and others) all contribute pieces to varying degrees of success. Frank’s longtime editor prefaces the collection, describing it as a fitting tribute to a beloved friend who just happened to be a best-selling author, while Frank’s husband, daughter, and son each contribute a foreword, introduction, and afterword respectively.
While writing what would turn out to be her final novel before her untimely passing, Frank informed her editor that she already had a title and an idea for her next work: Reunion Beach. Following Frank’s passing, her editor searched through the late author’s computer for an outline or a manuscript, and, finding nothing, she called on Frank’s writer/author friends to contribute novellas, short stories, and essays with a common theme: beach set reunions. What resulted was published under the title Reunion Beach as a final tribute to their friend, Dorothea Benton Frank, a woman much loved and missed by her family, friends, and fans.
As a whole the collection is very uneven in terms of quality and adherence to the scope of the book. However, there are some gems throughout that make this book hard to put down. There’s one piece that made me want to read other works by its author. There’s another piece that completely turned me off reading any further works by that particular author. And then there’s the piece that, while a perfectly fine, interesting essay, made me question what it was doing in this collection since it was neither about a beachside reunion nor about the author’s friendship with Frank (at least not until very late in the piece).
“The Bridesmaids” by Patti Callahan. This piece opens the collection, and, having read and reviewed previous works by Callahan (written under the name Patti Callahan Henry), it does not quite live up to the quality of Callahan’s previous works that I’ve read. “The Bridesmaids” had a whiff of the author phoning in the piece, if you know what I mean. After turning down a marriage proposal from the man she loves, a woman calls together her college friends for a weekend getaway to a secluded beach cottage. As the woman obsesses over why she couldn’t just say yes to her boyfriend’s proposal, her pals are supposed to help her figure out why she instead said no and how she can possibly reconcile with her boyfriend. It seemed to me to be a lot of hemming and hawing over nothing at all with a side of manufactured drama.
“The Summer of ’79” by Elin Hilderbrand. This piece is a sequel to Hilderbrand’s previous novel The Summer of ’69, published in 2019. It possesses all the hallmarks of a Hilderbrand work: messy family drama, suspense, great writing. I haven’t read The Summer of ’69 and had no trouble picking up where “’79” begins. A blended family gathers on Nantucket Island for the funeral of their difficult, opinionated, beloved family matriarch and high angst, drama, and various old flames are (rather messily) reignited.
“Postcards From Heaven” by Adriana Trigiani. The premise of this novella is the kind of imagined fantasy that you don’t usually put out into the world by committing it to paper and publishing it in a collection with works by other popular authors where lots of people and the general public will likely read it. It’s weird, and it’s strange and not in a good way. The late acclaimed author Pat Conroy communicates with his good friend Dorothea Benton Frank from the great beyond via emails sent from PC to DBF until Frank’s own passing at which point she joins him at Halo, a bar hangout in the great beyond once frequented by other late literary luminaries. The two are eventually joined by another writerly friend. Again strange. And poorly done. PC’s emails are cringeworthy—no effort appears to have been taken to replicate Conroy’s and Frank’s voices in the emails and their dialogue respectively.
“Mother And Child Reunion” by Mary Alice Monroe. After surviving an abusive, adoptive mother and Munchausen by proxy, a daughter is reunited with her biological mother on a Carolina beach. This is a gem amidst the unevenness characterizing the collection. Poignant. Engaging. Tragic.
“Lowcountry Stew” by Cassandra King Conroy. Incidentally, Conroy is the widow of the late Pat Conroy, and she contributes what turns out to be the standout short story of this collection. A riveting, drama filled, messy beach-side reunion of a partially estranged, blended family in the South Carolina Low Country.
The top three works of the collection are Conroy’s, Monroe’s, and Hilderbrand’s contributions. Fans of each author will come for that author’s story and be pleasantly surprised and drawn in to the works of the other authors included herein because they’re readalikes of each other in terms of tone, story, pacing, and setting.
A Series of (Un)Fortunate Reviews 