Review: Sea Air, Salt Water & Salvation

Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans: A Novel

By Joanne DeMaio

319 pages. CreateSpace (March 11, 2013)

Over a year ago, I first “met” debut author Joanne DeMaio through her blog. New to blogging myself, I reviewed her first novel, Whole Latte Life. I was honored when she asked me to review her second novel, Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans.

“Someone once told her that the sea air and salt water are cleansing. They cure what ails you.”

Visit Joanne DeMaio's website.

Maris Carrington first met Eva Lane on vacation at Stony Point Beach as a girl. Reconnecting each summer until graduation, the women remain good friends into their thirties. Maris returns home to Connecticut following her father’s death after twelve years away chasing a denim-designing career in Chicago. When on an impulse she decides to linger at the beach a few weeks and finalize her father’s estate, Eva is thrilled. Together Maris and Eva decide to gather old beach friends for a July 4^th party. Then Maris plants flower seedlings at her rented beach cottage, needing time to reflect on more than her father’s death.

Eva married Matt Gallagher and stayed close to home as a pregnant wife at eighteen. Though happy as a wife, mother and realtor, she was adopted and obsessively searches for her birth family. Local cottage renovator and architect Jason Barlow lost his brother Neil and part of his leg in a horrific motorcycle accident six years ago. Kyle Bradford struggles to keep his marriage together and his family local after another layoff in the steel industry. Meanwhile, his wife Lauren longs for a lost lover and dreams of an easier life of painting seascapes on driftwood by the beach.

Told from the perspective of five characters, their stories wind through the regrets, memories, and distant hopes by the seaside of the Long Island sound. The novel, in keeping with its seaside setting, begins with a whirlwind of characters, present and past, then eases into a comfortable, soothing rhythm. Maris, Eva, Jason, Kyle and Lauren, though flawed, are highly relatable and complex people. Each faces either long-hidden family secrets or life-altering challenges.

In both novels, DeMaio excels with themes featuring loss and redemption, lasting connections and unconditional love. In Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans, her poignantly told story weaves the power our past holds with hopeful healing by the sea. It is a sensory story where simple images spark strong memories: looking out the window in a childhood home, a weathered rowboat moored on the beach, and the train whistling past a summer hangout.

Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans reconnects the beach and the past for old friends. In coming together they each find the solace and acceptance they need to rebuild their lives, their relationships, their careers, and their connections to each other.

“This beach has a way of casting its spell right through the windows under the guise of sea and salt, the call of the gulls, the sound of the waves.”

 And another passage I love.

“Time moves like the sea. She always felt so. Living right at the beach, time is placid and calm, soft waves of it rolling onto the shore of her days. One day follows the other, over and over, in a comfortable and reassuring way. No matter what she is doing, at any age, that awareness of the movement of the sea, and of waves of time, keeps her grounded."

Brazilian Laptop Project

This week my technical editing class covered cross-cultural communication. It seemed appropriate to share a professional international success story, especially one that sounds so much better here than the one-liner version on my résumé.

My last corporate project launched the first mobile product delivered to a Brazil local market for Compaq Computer Corporation (now Hewlett-Packard) in 2000. Pulling together a team comprised of third-party Taiwanese suppliers, ego-centric American product developers, proud Brazilian engineers and factory planners, a patriarchal Brazilian sales force and reporting to a Mexican national executive, we began the arduous task of building the first branded laptop in the country.

Brazil has one of the most complicated taxing structures in the world, raising the street price on laptops by more than US $1000. All components were historically manufactured and assembled into finished products by a third-party vendor in Taiwan, a role they were invested in retaining in full. The goal was to buy unassembled components and ship to our factory for build; a role the Brazilians felt was their overdue right. Spanning twelve-hour time differences, four primary languages, and three continents, we succeed in bringing a Brazilian-built laptop to the retail market on schedule.

I am largely missing from the story above, yet the project would not have happened without me.  Pregnant at 29, I certainly was not doing the heavy lifting to make this project a success. However, I had invested years into the relationships with all of the key players and was instrumental in keeping the team communicating and moving forward.

The project delivered incremental revenue of US $6.4m and gross margin dollars over US $1.8m (39% GM) in the first quarter. The proud Taiwanese crew sent a smiling photo of them wearing the team shirts emblazoned with the Brazilian flag. I was on maternity leave before market share figures were published. The day my son was born ten positions were added to our three-person department.

Yearbook Queen

For three years I produced the yearbook for my daughter’s middle school as a parent volunteer. Still in its infancy, the school was beginning its third year with nineteen students when we joined the community. The traditional first day of school takes place on the rolling fields of Genesee Valley Outdoor Learning Center in Parkton, Maryland. The nervous smiles, the fearful faces as they looked at the 40-foot tower they were expected to climb and the pride in their accomplishments as they rang the bell at the top were all captured in digital images. I reviewed the hundreds of photos I took that night and knew the school needed a way to capture the special role it played in each of these families’ lives.

As a parent, I attended the majority of school events with a camera around my neck. As photographer, I took over 75% of the images submitted. Then as parent volunteer, I facilitated student activities to get the kids involved in recording their memories with funny stories and interviews. As publisher I identified production options and reviewed publishers. As editor-in-chief, I culled through on average 3,000 images each year to select 450-750 for print. Then the fun began with hours of page layouts, captions, colors and titles. By the time I distributed the first books, I pronounced myself “Yearbook Queen.”

The yearbook captures the memories of each year, marks the physical and intellectual growth of its students, and provides prospective parents a glimpse of why they should consider the school for their children. When my daughter graduated, the underfunded school offered me a position in order to retain my yearbook services.

The Albatross at
Genesee Valley Outdoor Learning Center