Night Beach (4.5 stars) is about a one very simple thing. A girl surfer-slash-artist has a crush on a boy surfer who sees her — sometimes. But it’s also about a few other very complicated, possibly unreal things, which make this book overall very hard to define.
Abbie likes Kane; this much is clear. In fact, she’s obsessed with him, in that painfully teenage way that grovels for the tiniest morsel of acknowledgement and acceptance. This kid, Kane, is a few years older, stays in a room in the house Abbie lives in with her parents, and treats Abbie with the perfect mix of casual ennui and occasional magnetic intensity to keep her on the hook. So many of us have had a crush like this, who, either out of obliviousness or from the vanity of being admired, keeps the tether ruthlessly engaged.
Where the clarity of the story goes sideways — and I don’t mean that in a bad way — is in the ways that Abbie’s natural creativity blurs the lines with her obsession and her need to be something more significant to Kane than the girl in the house. If somehow she can become “the only one who understands him”, she might mean something to him. Fortunately for her, Kane has just returned from a long surfing trip, and he seems to have brought back a creeping darkness with him that turns him hot and cold, moody but dangerous and physically burning when Abbie is near. Is this natural perfidy, or is he actually haunted?
I don’t want to give a lot away here, because I think this is one of those books that is best experienced individually and left up to the reader to decide the degree of reality present. The prose contributes to this dissociative effect, written as it is greatly in metaphor and with a sense of foreboding. There is always lurking around the corner in this book, whether it’s Kane’s demons, Abbie’s insecurity, or something altogether more tangible and frightening.
I was sent an electronic copy of this book from a friend, but as far as I can tell from a cursory internet search, it’s unfortunately hard to acquire, at least here in the US. This seems a shame, as I feel like there could be a lot of YA readers who would enjoy the mood and unstable reality of the story, not to mention the aching helplessness of Abbie herself, swept up in the current of her first major love (of its variety) and creating her own ways to cope. Even more unfortunately, I find myself curious to read more of Kirsty Eagar’s work, but her other books seem to be equally difficult to find. I’ll just have to keep an eye open, as I really enjoyed Night Beach and I think Eagar seems to have a talent for not only putting words to a feeling, but exploring the manifestations of that feeling in a more abstract way.
