The Beach Trees

March 28, 2011
White (On Folly Beach) spins a convoluted story of unexplained disappearances and family secrets stretching from New Orleans to Biloxi, Miss. Five years after Katrina, New Yorker Julie Holt arrives in New Orleans with a mission: she's got a deed to a Biloxi beach house and surprise custody of Beau, her late friend Monica's five-year-old son, and she intends to introduce Beau to the extended family he's never met. Soon, with the help of Monica's grandmother, Aimee, and brother, Trey, Julie begins to piece together exactly why Monica left her home and family, and that Monica's family's secrets run deep and murkyâthey involve a murder, a famous painter, and a disappearanceâwhich Julie can relate to, as her own sister was kidnapped when she was a child. Told in alternating chaptersâJulie in the present, Aimee in the 1950sâas both women search for answers to their respective mysteries, the novel is slow moving and more confusingly teased out than the plot warrants, with White's descriptions of the gulf coastâand New Orleans in particularâoffering more reason to keep reading than the less than expert treatment of the families' tormented pasts.