Amy Sue Nathan had me hooked when she compared the setting of The Last Bathing Beauty to those from Dirty Dancing and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Her novel made me think of both in various ways.

This was a great story overall. I loved the South Haven scenery and mood. It made me think of when my family and I went to a resort in Wisconsin every summer. I liked the bits of Jewish information, such as keeping Kosher, observing Shabbat, etc. The nineteen fifties came to life through this story and I was able to visualize everything as it might have been back then.

I could relate to Betty with being boy crazy at eighteen, as I remember being the same way when I was starting college. I was definitely stressed out for her situation (which is revealed before it's actually played out). There were some surprises that I did not see coming at all, even with the foreshadowing. I love that Betty/Boop stayed friends with Georgia and Doris for such a long time and how they looked after each other. Their friendship reminded me of Donna, Rosie, and Tanya in Mamma Mia.

My only hangup was that I wasn't a fan of the name Boop by itself. It worked when paired with Betty because of the cartoon icon, but sounded strange otherwise. This didn't take away from my enjoyment of the novel.

This was an interesting and thought-provoking story and Amy Sue Nathan did a great job telling it and keeping me engaged the entire time.

Movie casting suggestions:
Betty: Odeya Rush
Georgia: Ella Wahlestedt
Doris: Sami Gayle
Abe: Luke Benward
Marv: Alex Wolff
Hannah: Melissa Benoist
I'll trust Hollywood to cast Boop and her friends...

The perfect blend of storytelling and mystery creating the perfect beach read for our customers this summer!

What a delightful quick paced summer read. When "Boop"'s grandaughter shows up for an unexpected visit she brings news for Boop. Boop and her lifelong friends decide Boop needs to share the secret she held for life and was hoping to take it to her grave.

This story has a dual timeline, present day and then the 1950s, the story all centred on Betty Stern. Betty lives with her grandparents, after her parents left her in their care, and helps out in the summer camp they run in the catskills. I loved the 1950s atmosphere created by the writer, the innocence of those times.  Betty and her young friends are out to have a fun last summer before they go off to work or college. However the events that summer will certainly change the plans of one of the girls. 
In the present day Betty is back at the camp and her granddaughter visits unexpectedly, with her own dilemma. This is a story of family, friends and love. A great summer read.

Rating:   4 stars
This is a great read for our almost summer reading season.  I’d classify this a Women’s Fiction with a beachy feel.  The story is told in dual timelines of the 1951 version of Betty (Boop) Stern, and her 2017 version.  

We watch Boop navigate both time periods and understand how choices made by her family members, and herself helped to shape her future.  This is a story about family connections.  I enjoying learning about the Midwest ‘Catskills’ lake side resort in Michigan.  It’s where Betty grew up with her Jewish grandparents after having been abandoned by her parents.  I also appreciated how choices made that fateful summer when Boop was just eighteen, affected the rest of her life.  It also helped give her the wisdom as to how to answer a grand-daughter’s plea for help during her own crisis.

I enjoyed so many things about this book including the gorgeous cover.  This was such a lovely and relatable read about family, love, connections, and following your heart.  

‘Thank-You’ to NetGalley; the publisher, Lake Union Publishing; and the author, Amy Sue Nathan, for providing a free e-ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The beach has always done wonders for my soul, and this book set on the beach did the same. Every page is so drenched with the promise of summertime and the excitement of budding romance that I’d swear I lived these experiences right along with Betty, taking evening strolls to the arcade and gazing at fireworks on the boardwalk. The 1950s have always been one of my favorite time periods, and the details—from the penny loafers and dresses packaged in tissue to the families that flocked to resorts in the summer—transported me to an era that I desperately wanted to lose myself in. I adored Betty, both in girlhood and as the present-day Boop, and spending time with her family, her girlfriends, and her great love was the exact escape I needed.

Amy Sue Nathan is the kind of magnificent writer who can create a world you just want to curl up and live in for a while. That type of novel is one I’ll turn to time and time again, but especially now. For fans of the ‘50s, for fans of Dirty Dancing-esque summer loves, and for those in need of a seaside escape, I highly recommend this wonderful read. Self-isolating is a lot less isolating when you’re spending time with The Last Bathing Beauty.

Absolutely delightful escapism to a back-in-time era when hair was curled and lipstick was bright. I loved this transporting story that held me in rapt attention, liking the characters so much, smiling as this story zipped along. Nathan rings true in crafting a realistic setting and storyline, so that you're always present in the book's world. I love when a book delivers more than the cover and description promise, and I love that deeply satisfied feeling at the end that I've just been on a wonderful getaway and the time to return is perfect, and I am better for having been there. Wonderful work. I'll check out more of this author's works.

Heart-warming, beautifully written, and a glimpse back to an era when the options and choices available to young women were very different. A lovely summer read.

This was so much fun to read! Written in a twin timeline, I was swept back to the 1950's in a family resort where everyone knew each other, and community was paramount. Admittedly, it gave me Dirty Dancing vibes and I was all for it. These were the kinds of vacations that I never had, nor did my parents, so the entire reading of this book was an escape. I loved the lost love/second chance just lovely and perfect.

In the tradition of sagas such as the The Shell Seekers, The Last Bathing Beauty uses the narrative of an older woman reflecting back on the pivotal events of her life.  I didn't know that there were Catskill like resorts (like those in Dirty Dancing) on Lake Michigan, but Amy Sue Nathan describes the sights, sounds, and smells evocatively.  Betty Stern is a likable heroine and I loved the descriptions of that summer of 1951 right down to the peep toed shoes and shades of lipstick.

Truly a novel of life coming full circle, as Betty herself notes, while not diminishing the decades in the middle.

Such a perfect book for a lazy summer afternoon.

This story was great!  It transitioned smoothly between the 1950s Betty version and the present day Boop version.  The 1950s era is not one that I have often read about and this book made me.want to experience more from that time frame.  A great beach read that connects readers to the characters with a hint of mystery.

I really wanted to ljke this one because I loved the cover - but it just didn’t do it for me. I didn’t find the wiring to be compelling or well done. However, I could be the odd one out on this one! •

I will say that this book jumps from the past - Summer is 1951 - to the 21st century future: I enjoyed the modern aspect of the story slightly more (there were some Golden Girls vibes in there). •

The story focuses in on the life of a former beauty queen, and the summer that changed her life forever, as she dreamed of a career, marriage, and life of her own. Decades later, she is forced to look back at the decisions that caused that summer to end in tragedy and forced her to make choices that ultimately led her to a life that was nothing like what she had imagined and dreamed of. •

An interesting take on happiness and contentment versus passion and dreams, family, and the way we are beholden to the times we are born into, it was an intriguing read. The bonus was an extremely happy ending, if it did occur in old age. •

I wanted to love this book, I am a sucker for summer camp type stories, but I was sadly disappointed.  The story is told in present-day, as well as flashbacks from 1951 and centers around Betty/Boop and how her summer in 1951 is still affecting her life in present day.  I did enjoy the flashback portions of the story, but felt that the entire story moved along at too frenetic a pace and felt rushed.  The characters were vapid and lacked any kind of development.

EXCERPT: Summer 2017

Boop Peck had looked everywhere for her favourite lipstick. It wasn't in the bathroom, or in her purse, bedroom, or her pocket. She shuddered at the injustice: Boop remembered her first telephone number - 359J - but not the whereabouts of the lipstick she'd worn the day before. Or was it the day before that? She peeked around and patted herself again. Nothing. A lost lipstick wasn't the end of the world. Unless it was Sly Pink, her discontinued colour of choice, which it was.

Enough with the lipstick.

The girls would arrive soon. No, the ladies would arrive soon. Boop chuckled. Ladies sounded so stuffy, boring, and inaccurate. Even at eighty-four Boop and her friends would always be girls - and they'd never be boring.

ABOUT THIS BOOK: Everything seemed possible in the summer of 1951. Back then Betty Stern was an eighteen-year-old knockout working at her grandparents’ lakeside resort. The “Catskills of the Midwest” was the perfect place for Betty to prepare for bigger things. She’d head to college in New York City. Her career as a fashion editor would flourish. But first, she’d enjoy a wondrous last summer at the beach falling deeply in love with an irresistible college boy and competing in the annual Miss South Haven pageant. On the precipice of a well-planned life, Betty’s future was limitless.

Decades later, the choices of that long-ago season still reverberate for Betty, now known as Boop. Especially when her granddaughter comes to her with a dilemma that echoes Boop’s memories of first love, broken hearts, and faraway dreams. It’s time to finally face the past—for the sake of her family and her own happiness. Maybe in reconciling the life she once imagined with the life she’s lived, Boop will discover it’s never too late for a second chance.

MY THOUGHTS: What a delightful read! I really didn't want to close the rather beautiful cover on The Last Bathing Beauty by Amy Sue Nathan. I finished reading with tears in my eyes and a smile on my face.

This is a story of family and friendship, hope and disappointment, owning your mistakes, taking control over your own future and making it the best future it could possibly be.

The summer Betty was four, her parents had dropped her off with her grandparents in South Haven for the weekend - and had never come back for her. Her Jewish grandparents have raised her with love, a strong work ethic, and big dreams for her future. But the summer of 1951, the year Betty is crowned Miss South Haven, just when it seems that all her dreams are within reach, something happens to change her life.

The Last Bathing Beauty travels back and forward in time between 1951, when she was still Betty Stern, a smart and sassy girl on the cusp of a great future, and 2017 when she is Boop Peck, widow, mother of one son, grandmother of two girls, and great-grandmother of 2 point something great-grandchildren.

Betty is quite wonderful. I fell in love with her character. I aspire to be her should I make the great age of eighty-four. Actually, I aspire to be her long before then. She is going to be my role model.

Amy Sue Nathan has created a vivid and captivating picture of life in a Jewish family at a holiday camp in 1951. The summer romances, the morals and mores of the time, so very different from now, when mixing outside your social/religious/racial circle was frowned upon, and young women were expected to marry to please their families and improve their social status.

This is a lovely story, told with both humour and empathy. I will be reading this author's other books. Highly recommended.

❤😪❤😪.5

'You're never too old to find love and throw a good party.'

'Sometimes it takes a long time to get things right.'

THE AUTHOR: Amy Sue Nathan is Writer of novels, lover of cats, morning coffee, dark chocolate, and bold lipstick. Former vegetarian, occasional crafter, adequate cook, loyal friend, proud mom to two awesome adults.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Lake Union Publishing via NetGalley for providing a digital ARC of The Last Bathing Beauty by Amy Sue Nathan for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This review and others are also published on Twitter, Amazon, Instagram and my webpage sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This was a lovely book that really brought to life experiences of holiday camps in the 1950s - it reminded me of Dirty Dancing. I thought it was very sensitively written and the love story unfolded slowly and beautifully. The two different stories told - of Betty young and old - were really well intertwined and, even though I had already guessed the ending, I still enjoyed reading every page. A great, comforting read

The charming writing of Amy Sue Nathan and the even more charming heroine she gives us deflect all of The Last Bathing Beauty’s sins. Though the plot has some predictable points, the utterly disarming story is a page turner and a great summer read.

In the summer of 1951, eighteen year old Betty Stern is an ambitious, go-getting gal – blonde, sun-worshipping, fun-loving - with an attitude and spunk that grabs the reader and makes them take notice of her from the first page. We first meet her as she’s preparing to enter into a not-entirely happy shotgun marriage. Betty is going to take a bad hand and turn it into a winning one with time, but she doesn’t know that yet.

In the summer of 2017, Betty is known by the nickname Boop, and she’s a lively eighty-four-year-old whose twenty-six-year-old granddaughter, Hannah, arrives at the cusp of a major life change.  Hannah – much like Betty was all those years ago – is pregnant, and torn between entering into a marriage with a man she doesn’t love or trying life as a single mother.  Boop knows that the road she took is one that eventually satisfied her, but she’d rather Hannah not make the same mistakes she did.

Both parts of the story take place in South Haven, a Michigan town in the Catskills of the West along Lake Michigan, where the Stern family lives year-round and runs a resort every summer.

There, Betty will grow from a girl set to go to Barnard, who dreams of becoming a fashion magazine editor, into the kind who makes meatloaf on Tuesdays and runs away with her son to Lake Michigan in the summers.  From a childhood at her Nannie and Zaide’s home, and rejected by her wannabe, show-business-obsessed parents, she moves into a house of her own, a style of her own.  To a life in which her best friends Georgia and Doris – who love her deeply – are ever present, but who harbor secrets from her.  From her longing for a last summer romance to a true-love tangle with half-Jewish college guy Abe Barsky, and a choice between him and the safety of a union with her dependable childhood friend, Marv Peck.  All the while, the Miss South Haven beauty pageant looms in the background, teasing Betty with possibility. What happens to Betty at the pageant will both allow her a place in history and give her major room to reflect upon her life years down the road.

The worst thing I can say about The Last Bathing Beauty is that its plot is a little predictable.  But you won’t notice, once you’re in the embrace of Betty, seeing the world through her eyes and experiencing life in her enclave of resort-dwellers.  Nathan gives us a glimpse into Jewish life in the ‘50s that rings true and sings beautifully, and even though Betty’s predicament – and its resolution – is made clear within the first few chapters of the book, it’s no less absorbing a read.

Its characters are mostly well drawn, though Abe doesn’t get enough time to develop layers, Doris fades into the background (she could have been eliminated from the narrative to afford more time to Georgia, who has a crucial role to play), and Hannah is particularly entertaining and interesting.

But it’s the right kind of fluffy, the right kind of sentimental – and the right kind of lively.  Though Boop has a few regrets, she’s not even a little bit self-pitying, and her unique voice is captivating. But the book also makes a point about how sexism and narrow-mindedness combined to limit her choices and circumscribe her life down to something smaller.

The Last Bathing Beauty is just as toasty and lovely as a beach in the summertime.  It comes with a high recommendation and is well worth losing yourself in for a few hours.

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I wasn’t sure what to expect going into this book. I knew it would be a light read filled with love and laughter. But it has so much more. It’s a story that will make your heart fill, make it ache, make it beat fast and make it break. This is my first book by Amy Sue Nathan and I was not at all disappointed. It had so much going on that I could not put it down. Turning the pages to see what happens next and having such deep emotions is what makes a book great. This book is great.

Betty was a teen who seemed to have it all. She lived with her grandparents who adored her and gave her all they could. They owned a resort and Betty worked helping them out and had many friends. Two best friends who shared everything. The summer of 1951 was the best and worse year of Betty’s life. She fell in love, she competed in a beauty contest, she married and she got pregnant. But she had planned on going to New York and going to college. Becoming a fashion editor and living the dream before marriage and a family. She planned on marrying the love of her life and living happily ever after with him. But time was not in her favor. The year was a time when she would make hard decisions and give up her dreams for something else. She married and had a child. She fell in love with her husband and had a good life. But it wasn’t the life she planned. 

Betty married Marvin and became Boop. Marvin had always called her Boop and thus it stuck. They had a long and happy marriage. Boop’s granddaughter comes to her with a big problem that is much like the one Betty faced when she was eighteen years old. The difference here is Boop stood by Hannah where Betty’s grandmother didn’t. As much as she loved Betty she thought she was doing what was right. Betty had a different plan and things did work out ok. Betty/Boop lived a good life but still you get the feeling something has been missing all these years. As she tells Hannah her story in 2017 this book goes back to 1951 and so much is revealed to Hannah. Things that will help her to move on with her life and have the love she so desperately wants.

This story is told in two different timelines and is done to perfection in my opinion. The things that happen in the 50s make you glad you didn’t have to go through that kind of thing. Women were truly not treasured very much. I mean that they had husbands who were more their bosses then partners. They had not choices in many things, including having babies, marrying for love, going to college. Having a life. It was unfair but was how it was. Betty/Boop had a good life but not the life she could have had if her grandparents would have stood by her no matter what. If they would have considered her feelings and not just how it might look or how things were being Jewish. It didn’t seem like love was to be the most important part of their arrangement for her. She did what she had to and did find a happiness eventually. Love did happen. 

This book is such a good one. Filled with love that is found, lost and found again. Family who should be there no matter what and isn’t always. Friends who know all there is to know about each other with a couple of secrets thrown in but found out late in life. Betty/Boop at age 18 then at age 84. I enjoyed this book so much and hated for it to end. Though it ended with perfection. I loved this story. It’s one that will lift your spirits while bringing big tears to your eyes too. It made me laugh and cry. I had some serious tears in places. The characters are all very likable and so well developed. The storyline will keep you turning pages and rooting for love. It’s a very serious but also a lighthearted book. 

Thank you to #NetGalley #LakeUnion, #AmySueNathan for the ARC of this book. This is my review as I see it.

A big 5 stars and very high recommendation..

This was a joy to read, it’s fun & entertaining and has the old beach bingo vibe! So great to relive Betty’s younger years, the good and the bad. Thanks to NetGalley and Lake Union Publishing for an ebook copy. This is my honest review.

I enjoyed this book immensely. It was so hopeful and positive, though heartwrenching from betrayal at times. The story follows 84-year-old Boop as the arrival of her dearest friends and granddaughter force her to remember the good and bad of the summer of 1951, when she was 18-year-old Betty. Betty planned on a summer romance while she worked at her grandparent's resort on Lake Michigan, winning the local beauty pageant, and then jetting off to New York City for college and a career in the fashion industry. And, like most wonderful plans, her summer didn't go as she'd imagined. 

Boop remembers this, sharing secrets and stories with her friends and family, but we get to relive the summer with her from Betty's perspective. I enjoyed the chapters from both points in her life, though some ended on cliffhangers and then switched - taking me back to 1951 when I wanted to stay in 2017 and vice versa. I learned more about Jewish life, too. 

I did get frustrated with all the secrets the characters kept from each other, because I felt like it overcomplicated their situations too much. There were a lot of unexpected moments for me, even when I thought I'd picked up on the foreshadowing and correctly guessed what would happen. Also, I sometimes felt the writing was overly descriptive, or maybe I just missed some comparisons. 

Nathan's book was overall a delight to read. It's full of life and love, that of family, friends, and a star-crossed romance. I liked reading about all the women supporting women in it. I recommend this book if you want a happy ending and feel-good book. If you like second chances, romance, and historical fiction, this is also for you! This is definitely a perfect summer or beach read - add it to your list!

I did not want this book to end.  From the beginning when she has her friends come down to the end you didn’t expect.  You never know how your life will turn out and what you think you missed you just have to wait longer for.