Beach Week

The looming specter of Beach Week—the traditional weeklong party held by recent high school graduates—drives the anxieties and recklessness of the characters in Coll's middling comedy. Despite their parents' close involvement, a group of girls from the D.C. suburbs proceed with their plans for debauchery at a Delaware rental house. Rudderless housewife Leah Adler and her increasingly distant husband, Charles, have not decided whether to let their daughter, Jordan, go, yet Leah becomes involved in the parental bureaucracy and controversy, and soon pins her hopes on being a chaperone. Jordan, meanwhile, falls into a mostly one-sided relationship with Khalid, a handsome college student who appears only marginally interested. Meanwhile, Noah, the owner of the girls' rented beach house, battles his increasingly odd inner world in an attempt to stay connected with his young son. Though well-written and occasionally incisive in its depiction of Facebook-era rites of passage, the novel contains few surprises, and the hurdles are both expected and easily overcome. (June)