Breakaway Books

Authored by Meg Waite Clayton; Published July 2025; Historical Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

Typewriter Beach let me escape to a beautiful setting, if not a beautiful era. Another historical fiction with a dual timeline narrative, it spun an interesting tale but was just a bit too messy for my taste.

In Typewriter Beach, Isobel dreams of being the next 1950s Hollywood starlet in the midst the terrifying events of the Red Scare. When an affair with a famous actor leaves her pregnant and abandoned, she is sent to Carmel to hide away, take care of the problem, and protect her image, but once there, she meets Leo Chazan, a blacklisted writer who becomes a dear friend. Decades later, Leo has died and his granddaughter Gemma has come to prepare his cottage for sale. As she discovers his secrets, she appears poised to reveal Isobel’s as well.

All too often with these dual timeline narratives, I simply find the “historical” part of the historical fiction be more engaging, and I wonder why there have to be two stories at all. Although Isobel’s arc is my favorite, this time, I understood the necessity of the flash forward to the present and Gemma’s story, if only as a way to appreciate the consequences of Isobel and Leo’s decisions all the more. Isobel stands out from other 1950s heroines, as she does not dream of a traditional romance—she is in love with acting, not with any man. Her half of the novel sheds light on a chilling time period, in which director turned against actor turned against writer at the drop of a hat if it meant clearing their names with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and the women of Hollywood were expected to project a very specific persona if they wanted success. I haven’t read a novel covering the Red Scare before and I appreciated this book for its singularity, and for its lack of a simple happy ending for Isobel.

But, the modern timeline is messier than I would have liked, with too much going on. Gemma’s love interest, Sam, has so much trauma in his past that he basically deserves his own novel, and it felt like neither he nor Gemma really got their due in terms of character development. I would have preferred to dive into the relationship between Gemma and Leo to give both of them more depth, rather than bringing in video game prodigy Sam. If you’ve read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Sam’s storyline has similar vibes, and I was torn between wanting to know a lot more about him and wishing he was entirely excised from the novel. Without Sam, I could have basked more in the pure joy that Leo had in raising a daughter and then a granddaughter, and it would have added a little more brightness to a somewhat dark novel. 

Typewriter Beach isn’t precisely uplifting, but it does have some engaging characters, and I certainly learned something about living through the Red Scare. To me, it’s worth a read.