The Last Bathing Beauty by Amy Sue Nathan: book review

The Last Bathing Beauty (2020) is set in South Haven, Michigan, America, in 1951.

Betty Claire Stern is 18 years old in 1951 and about to be married. She works in her grandparents’ lakeside resort, and wants to go to college in New York to become a fashion writer. Her future is rosy indeed.

But first she is spending one last summer at the beach, entering the Miss South Haven beauty contest with nineteen other girls. Nancy or Zaide will probably win the title, although Betty was surely ‘Miss Moxie’ the smart and sassy girl.

In 2017, Betty Claire Peck is 84 years old, with a son Stuart, and two grand-daughters, 26-year-old Hannah with artist boyfriend Clark, and 28-year-old Emma with husband Grant and three-year-old twins Oliver and Holden, still at the Stern’s Summer Resort. Her grand-daughters call her Boop.

Betty Boop is catching up with the girls, her old friends Doris and Georgia, remembering their lives back when they were eighteen. They find old magazine articles about the ‘brown-haired, blue-eyed’ winner. Betty reminisces about the bathing beauty contest and how it changed her life.

Would she have done things differently? Is there still time for a second chance at the life she dreamed of? Should she tell her grand-daughters what really happened? No more secrets.

This is brief, light, fun, easy-reading chick-lit to while away a wintery afternoon.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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