“Beach Vibes follows” sandwich shop owner Beth. Beth is divorced and realizes that it’s been a year and she needs to actually get a friend and maybe date. She thinks the woman she hangs out with at the local food bank, Jana, maybe a good person to become friends with.
Jana though is dealing with having a young daughter and finishing up at community college so she can apply for nursing school. She does realize that she needs someone to hang out with that is not a member of her family. She’s happy to start a friendship with Beth. Things turn a bit though when Beth realizes that Jana who has been dating a mysterious doctor, is actually dating Beth’s brother Rick.
I think that this book would have hit harder if we actually had the character of Beth realizing what was going on with her brother a lot earlier. I just felt that she was written way too naive when everyone else was clicking what was going on there. The insta-love she had for Teddy didn’t really grab me either. I think that the slowly building friendship with Jana and Beth were supposed to be the forefront of the story. But, I didn’t find Beth to be someone I would want to be friends with. I thought it was weird that both women seemed to have zero female friends outside of each other. It just didn’t feel real.
The big mess of Rick just felt like it fit a different book.
I also thought the ending of the book needed more time to breathe. You don’t get to see a solid resolution for either women, you just guess how things go from there.
I read this for CBR17bingo, “B. The first letter, or first major word of the title begins with a B. This fits the third row, 1st square.