Nina Purtee’s BEYOND THE SEA (Annie’s Journey into the Extraordinary) is a book full of delicious wish-fulfillment, with a beautiful young heroine, raised in multiple cultures, fashionable, intelligent and charming, wealthy enough to travel around the world on yachts and planes without a thought, surrounded by tall, dark, handsome young men eager for romance. Okay, sure, her father’s gone missing and her cousin’s in a coma, but the book doesn’t tend to pay much attention to these problems until it’s forced to, preferring to spend much more time dwelling on the scenery, souvenirs, delicious food, and friendly people in every lovely locale Annie visits, from Marrakesh to Marbella to Mykonos, Komodo to Karpathos. She finds friends in every corner of the world, particularly intelligent, creative women who instantly become like sisters to her, and wildly attractive men eager to show her around and flirt with her intensely.
In the midst of all this delightful, sunny exploration, the mystery of what’s happened to her father, and his rescue, is almost a minor diversion, taking up only a short part of the middle of the book and requiring little or no actual active effort from Annie. Indeed, she’s a relatively passive heroine, who goes where the wind drives her, is happy enough to explore, but rarely actually takes over the action of the book – things happen to her rather than her driving them. Even the romantic tension surrounding the two men she ends up most deeply attracted to is settled more because one of them retires from the field for cultural reasons rather than because she makes an active choice between them. There’s little or no unpleasantness or disturbance to this beautiful world – political or moral questions are mostly glossed over and Annie does not trouble her head over, say, what the people of Hong Kong think about British or Chinese occupation, or the cruelty of bullfighting aside from the risks it poses to her matador boyfriend. In short, this is not a book for people who want dramatic action, political or moral quandaries, or particularly thought-provoking work – it’s an escape, a vacation for the mind, which is of course a perfectly valid purpose for a book. It goes on perhaps a bit too long, and by the end can be a bit repetitive and even dull, as with anyone showing off pictures and stories of their beautiful vacations. But on the whole, it’s a perfectly valid and valuable escape for someone who just wants to fantasize about enjoying themselves in luxurious locales with lovely, happy people.
A luxurious and sensual story of a young woman’s journeys around the world, BEYOND THE SEA by Nina Purtee is pure wish-fulfillment, if occasionally less exciting than it has the potential to be.
~Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader