Typewriter Beach, Meg Waite Clayton (Review by Lara Ferguson)

Rating: 4.0/5 Stars

1957 in Hollywood, an era of opaque contracts filled with double-standards, glamorous actresses, handsome leading men, ambitious screenwriters, and the search for communists in their midst. A time of distrust when all actors and writers are required to sign an oath of loyalty to the United States and are still all but forced to testify against each other or risk blacklisting.

Isabella Giori, under studio contract, is determined to be a star. She has been spotted by Alfred Hitchcock and could be his next leading lady but that will not happen until an “issue” she is experiencing is taken care of. Whisked off by the studio, to a cottage in Carmel for a secret meeting intended to resolve the issue, Isabella is awakened early the first morning by the sound of a typewriter operated by a blacklisted Hollywood writer known as Chazan.

Fade to 2018 in Carmel, and Gemma Chazan, granddaughter of Chazan, arrives to sell the cottage that belonged to her late grandfather and discovers a safe containing a camera with undeveloped film and other treasures that compel her to begin a journey of discovery that will unravel long-held secrets and lead her to explore the sexism and free speech restrictions of her grandfather’s era and re-examine her ideas of what family is.

Meg Waite Clayton pulls the reader into the story with nuanced, believable characters and prose that tells “just enough” to keep reading until the end. This is a hard-to-put-down book that asks big questions. Typewriter Beach is not just a captivating story about Hollywood in the 50’s and 60’s or another examination of what family is about, it is also a portrait of the strength and importance of friendship and an intense look at the effect that the sowing of distrust can have on society.