Customer Reviews

Beachglass: A Novel

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Wendy Blackburn's novel introduces the reader to a group of engaging and diverse characters through whom one is able to explore what it means to be human. The story is compelling, the characters are rich, the imagery is intense. Beachglass is a novel that reminds the reader of the importance of looking beyond the surface...as true beauty is often buried deep beneath many protective layers.

I could not put this book down. Delia tells her story in the present and in flashbacks. In the current time, Delia is holding the hand of her best friend while he dies. Kleenex alert!! Delia and Timothy walk this path together in an agony of loss and triumph. We meet Delia some 13 years before as a physically and emotionally bankrupt 17 year old. She comes to rehab as an 89 pound, half dead druggie/alcoholic. Faced with the choice to live or die, Delia makes the courageous leap to grab life. In the rehab Delia meets a delightfully quirky and human cast of characters who will become her friends and guides as she learns how to live a sober life. This book is gritty and sweaty and unflinchingly honest about what it is like to be in recovery. It's a story about how Delia learns to live and to embrace all the scars and challenges that polish and grow her into being a beautiful and unique piece of art, like Beachglass.

I have long been fascinated by issues related to addiction and alcoholism and have read several books (fiction and non-fiction) on this subect; Beach Glass is definitely one of the best I've read. The indepth portrayal of people in the throes of and recovering from various addictions is amazing. It is great the way the author can realistically create characters from all different backgrounds (gay, straight, male, female). And I loved the way she wove the details of the locations (sounds, sights, etc) into the story. I loved this book and would recommend it to anyone, regardless of whether you are in the addictions counseling field or not.

When a customer asks me 'What book would you recommend?', I ask them at least 20 questions before I even hazard a guess. Then I suggest a book that I feel most relates to their particular situation.

Gleefully, Beachglass is a book I can recommend with reckless abandon to anyone who walks into my store. ANYONE who reads this capitaving tale will be entertained and indeed educated about the recovery side of the deadly diseases of alcoholism and addiction.

I loved this book!

Blackburn captures the trials, the grit, the anger, the rigidity of the young addict with exacting detail AND eloquence. Imagine: a first novel that is incredibly well written! Her wry sense of humor weaves a thread through, and she always gets back to the point that recovery and addiction are serious business. A REALLY GOOD read, especially for people who are young in recovery.

I want to read much more from this author...

Wendy Blackburn has made a five-star debut with Beachglass, a story of life, love, romance, and recovery. Through the eyes and heart of Delia, a recovering addict, she takes the reader on a remarkable journey into the depths of addiction soaring to the heights of recovery. From the past to the present, it is a poetic tapestry of words and wonder.

Wendy's writing is simply delightful, colorful, concise, and captivating. She describes seemingly mundane details in hypersensitive three-dimension. Every description is a painting in soft hues.

Delia, a recovering addict, wife, and mother, leaves her family to fly to Los Angeles to fulfill a promise made long ago to a friend she met in treatment who is living with AIDS, a promise to be there when the end comes. In the process she reflects on sobriety and serenity, anger and acceptance, grief and love. She experiences the powerful flames of temptation for a former lover that still bubbles and burns. In a few short weeks with her dying friend, who faces death with dignity, she stands tall in the sunlight of her sobriety. During her time with Timothy, Delia relives a 12 year journey through life, death, and recovery, one page at a time.

The unlikely cast of characters who emerge from the depths of addiction into the sunlight of recovery are strikingly real. Meet Delia, Timothy, Simon, Clara, James, Rafael, Joan, Hap, Matt, and the predictably unpredictable Zodiac. They go their separate ways after treatment, only to be reunited by Timothy's death, which turns into a celebration of sobriety and a tribute to treatment and recovery.

It's a novel about recovery, but it's so much more. It's a novel about AIDS, but it's so much more. It's about death, but more about life. Beachglass is a story of meeting life on life's terms. It's about love long lost, but ever remembered, and truly honored simply for what it was and what it will always be. It is about temptation and truth, as a young recovering addict deals with her demons past and present with compassionate guidance from her ever-accepting sponsor.

Ms. Blackburn gives the reader an intimate look inside the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, behind the walls of treatment, and into recovery, the bright side of addiction, where miracles happen. And Beachglass is filled with miracles.

It's one of the most poignant portrayals of recovery that I have ever read, and a remarkable vehicle for those who seek to know more about addiction. It's a sharing of experience, strength and hope, which resounds with acceptance, strength and wisdom overflowing with raw pain and unconditional love, and with rage and compassion, as memories and dreams collide. It's written with a tapestry of magical colors that blend into the fabric of life and love, of growth and perseverance, of not just surviving, but thriving. It's all about letting go and gathering in, it's about breathing and not breathing.

For those who wonder what happens in a treatment center and the months and years thereafter, this book is a true portrait of courage, strength and hope. If you are in recovery, you'll find your friends here. If you suffer from AIDS you will recognize a care giver's comfort, compassion and unconditional love. If you are affected by neither you will profoundly understand both better.

Ms. Blackburn takes the reader on a roller coaster of raw emotions that catches fire and spreads with the winds of change. It will tear at your heart, slit it open and then gently heal it with incredible richness and tenderness. The book becomes its own exquisite piece of beachglass, washed up on the shores of time, with incredibly soft edges. Beachglass is not just for those interested in the subject of addiction, it's for everyone who loves a powerful story, colorful characters, a believably solid plot and absolutely delicious writing.

Neil Scott, Producer/Host

RECOVERY - Coast to Coast

Nightly 2 hour radio talk show

Fabulous book, hard to believe this is the author's first work! Each page reads like a conversation with a good friend; it has that easy cadence and believability. I'm eager to read more from this author.

Blackburn's book shows the tremendously rich life that's possible for the characters explicitly because they are in recovery. Life's trials were realistically approached and the characters were able to make it because they found community with one another. They seem to get to the point where they know they may not be "normal" but they understand that they are better than normal because they face life's challenges by sticking together, being their weird and wonderful selves and doing the hard work of living a concious life.

Blackburn has an incredible gift for placing you right there in the story. At moments I got little chills. There were suspenseful scenes that kept me reading when I should've really gone to bed already. Her ability to point out the absurdities of life cracked me up. And as the journey was coming to a close and the pages dwindled, I was able to really feel the sadness of the main characters as the story was coming to a close.

I would recommend this book not only for those in "the tribe" of 12-Steppers but for anyone who has had to deal with issues related to life changes like leaving home, having close friends get sick and die and all the craziness of relationships from tempting flirtations to just realizing it's time to end a relationship. I suspect everyone could relate to something in this book.

In the beautifully realized novel Beachglass, author Wendy Blackburn, drawing upon her experiences as a dependency councilor, writes a compelling account of those afflicted with the disease of drug and alcohol addiction. Delia has been living a comfortable and quiet life in Seattle with her kindly husband Simon and their young daughter Clara, when the dreaded call comes from Los Angeles.

Her best friend Timothy is dying of AIDS and she knows that she must fly to West Hollywood to be with him. It was almost ten years ago when they made that first "no matter what" pact at the rehab center that no matter what happened they would always be there for each other in their hour of need.

Timothy was her first soul mate and part of her "homeland," so back she goes to Los Angeles "where brown filth choked the earth and stunted its growth with a film of polluted dust and stillness." It's been over ten years since Delia last used, now she's a mother and wife - thirty years old; Seattle has made her conservative.

Everything Delia had experienced up until this point had prepared, and strengthened, and even toughened her for Timothy's final goodbye. When she arrives and sees her friend, ravaged by disease, and an emaciated wreck, she feels pulled, as though there's a tug-of-war going on inside of her - "although my body lays along side Timothy's, my inner compass points north to Simon and Clara."

As she attends to Timothy's needs - spending her days comforting him, the routine of pills and the efforts to him - she reconnects with her old flame James from her Alcoholics Anonymous days. Their encounter re-ignites her passions and insecurities and she begins to reflect on those early days of addiction and recovery, those first few years of sobriety where "everything had been stripped away," to slowly be replaced by faith and a newly found sense of self-worth.

Delia first meets Timothy when her parents pack her off to the drug and alcohol unit of the local hospital. Timothy's lover had just died of AIDS, and he'd been caught up in the West Hollywood party scene. Delia had been using one chemical or another since she was eleven years old. Perhaps she learned it from her father, whose success had enabled him to keep drinking, or perhaps she felt responsibly for death of her twin brother.

Whatever the case, Delia had grown into a hard, devious and sullen teenager, a girl who was "bitter and fragile and calloused all at once." It is only through her friendship with Timothy that Delia learns to change and grow, to learn about faith and rebuild her spirit; their closeness is the core and the foundation, it is the "time and place we became inextricably welded together, one being that just happened to take up two bodies."

Blackburn excels in describing Delia's first weeks of sobriety and the harsh realities of addiction and recovery - the family meetings, the self-assertion courses, and the realization this group of strong-minded emotionally brittle people, are all addicts. Delia feels a mixture of relief and terror at her discovery, but as AA becomes her anchor - total strangers in fact save her life - she achieves a type of divine clarity that comes with retrospection.

Delia's journey of sobriety is constantly threatened to become undone. She always fights the temptation, the persistent voice talking into her ear, encouraging her to use again, the "anesthesia would be lovely," and "no one would know." But she knows she must go through those things sober, resolute that there's nothing she can't handle - no curveball that life can throw her.

All of these things create the impetus that forces Delia into the necessary changes to get her life back on track. Questioning her most basic assumptions and motives, the true nature of her addictions and the capacity to forgive and heal the pain. The irony is that as an addict she receives all kinds of gifts - liberation, gratitude, fellowship, responsibility, courage, love, and many new friends who end up orbiting her life.

Beachglass is an incredible journey, with Delia's growth and emotional restoration perfectly etched in time; her passage of memory is captured in stunning images and deeply effective symbolism. Beachglass are the little bits of tumbled glass you find in the sand - so easily considered trash jewelry - yet just like the drunks that Blackburn writes of, beachglass is always salvageable, sometimes even transcendent. Mike Leonard May 06.