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A Walk Along the Beach: A Novel by Debbie Macomber
A Walk Along the Beach
New Adult, Women's Fiction, Romance
Ballantine Books
March 9, 20201
Kindle, Paperback, Hardback, Mass Market Paperback, Audiobook
336
The Lakey sisters are perfect opposites. After their mother died and their father was lost in grief, Willa had no choice but to raise her sister, Harper, and their brother, Lucas. Then, as an adult, she put her own life on hold to nurse Harper through a terrifying illness. Now that Harper is better and the sisters are living as roommates, Willa has realized her dream of running her own bakery and coffee shop, bringing her special brand of caretaking to the whole Oceanside community.
Harper, on the other hand, is always on the go. Overcoming a terrible illness has given her a new lease on life, and she does not intend to waste it. When Harper announces her plan to summit Mount Rainier, Willa fears she may be pushing herself too far. Harper, for her part, urges Willa to stop worrying and do something outside of her comfort zone—like taking a chance on love with a handsome new customer.
Sean O’Malley is as charming as he is intriguing—a freelance photographer whose assignments take him to the ends of the earth. Soon Willa’s falling for him in a way that is both exciting and terrifying. But life has taught Willa to hedge her bets, and she wonders whether the potential heartache is worth the risk.
Life has more challenges in store for them all. But both sisters will discover that even in the darkest moments, family is everything.
A kaleidoscope of human emotions… 
Debbie Macomber encapsulates the human experience in her brilliantly simple, yet poignant, novel A Walk Along the Beach. Sisters, Willa and Harper Lakey, are completely opposite personalities but extremely close after weathering the trauma of loosing their mother to an aneurism while still in school, their father’s subsequent alcoholism due to her death, and Harper’s near death battle with Leukemia. For Willa, life is finally starting to fall in place: her coffee shop is consistently making a profit, Harper is three years in remission, and the handsome new customer, Sean O’Malley, is just as seriously interested in her as she is in him. But, when Sean’s career as a freelance photographer takes him away on an exotic and remote assignment just as Harper’s cancer resurfaces with a vengeance, Willa must choose whether loving is worth the risk to her already shattered heart. 
Willa, Harper, and Sean are wonderfully rich characters that perfectly connect with each other and the reader, imperfections and all. Their story is both entertaining on surface and profound on a deeper level in contemplating the bigger questions in life. A Walk Along the Beach does not shy away from including difficult and depressing events, cancer is a brutal and devastating disease that impacts millions of people and those closest to them. This is part of the reason A Walk Along the Beach is such an authentic story; it emulates real life as an endless cycle of good times and bad times and all the times in-between. The inclusion of difficult topics might sometimes be a drag on a story, but at every turn Debbie uses the events between Willa, Harper, Sean and their families, both happy and tragic, to encourage the reader in a positive way.
There is a reason that Debbie Macomber is so wildly popular, with five of her stories already made into Hallmark original movies. Like a beautifully created kaleidoscope, Debbie uses the varying facets of life: hope and fear, love and loss, life and death, in a stunning montage of color that continually morphs before your eyes as the story unfolds on the pages. Each and every change in mood and emotion is perfectly balanced in the narrative, allowing the reader the chance to intimately feel the highs and lows that the characters experience. A Walk Along the Beach will have you laughing and crying, sometimes at the same time, but always feeling positive about living life, one day at a time, and blessed to have the love and companionship of family and friends through it all.
Tanya’s love for books has been a lifelong passion that she likes sharing with others. Reading is also the thing that relaxes her after a day of juggling the many responsibilities that come with being being wife to an amazing man, mother to four great kids spread around the world, business manager, and farm hand on their place in southwest Missouri; home to Akaushi cattle and a menagerie of pygmy goats, horses, chickens, dogs and cats.
