Sometimes a book hits so close to home, you feel as though the author is writing about your own life. For me, Beach Read by Emily Henry did this. It’s not the happy go lucky romp the title implies. Never has a romance writer done a better job of highlighting the triumph of Light overcoming Darkness.
In Beach Read, two writers escape to homes overlooking the beach on Lake Michigan in an effort to understand and deal with the darkness of trauma and to write their next book before deadlines. In an effort to overcome writer’s block, they set a challenge to write in the other’s genre. The horror writer must write romance and the romance writer must find the horror in her story. Whoever gets published first wins.
The challenge highlights the heart wrenching beauty of love and writing, for both readers and writers who live in a broken world where “Happily Ever After” is a string of “Happy for Nows” lived one day at a time, every day. Happiness becomes a choice, a hard fought decision.
It’s a world where sometimes parents make bad decisions for good reasons. Where they stay in bad relationships because they try to create a world where fantasy exists. A world where parents and writers create Happily Ever After because their children and readers desperately wish to believe in it too.
“When you love someone…you want to make this world look different for them. To give all the ugly stuff meaning and amplify the good.“
Emily Henry says she tells readers this book is about two writers who challenge each other to write in each other’s genre. She tells writers it’s about writer’s block and facing our life’s hurdles so that “when we’re brave enough to do so we can make something beautiful. Something we didn’t know we were capable of before we began…that gives all the ugly stuff meaning and amplifies the good.”
This is what I focus on in my fantasy work in progress where light overcomes darkness and hope prevails. It takes a lot of self searching to write the book one is meant to write. Yet, we all have darkness in our lives. When writers can connect with readers and make a difference in the darkness, then light and hope prevail, no matter what the genre.
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