BookBrowse Reviews Beyond That, the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash

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Sent to America to escape the Blitz, 11-year-old Beatrix meets a new family whose presence and significance in her life will last decades.

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"It's been three days since the ship slowly pulled out of New York Harbor, since she watched her family get smaller and smaller. For one brief moment, she had held them in her palms before they disappeared." In Beyond That, the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash, Beatrix Thompson, 11 years old in 1940, arrives in a strangely idyllic America so different from her homeland across the Atlantic that it seems like an entirely different world. Her parents will continue living in London, waiting with bated breath for bombs to fall each night. Meanwhile, she is here, safe and sound on the East Coast but feeling utterly alone — that is, until she is collected by the Gregorys, the family with whom she has been assigned to live. Mr. Gregory is a schoolteacher; Mrs. Gregory is an effervescent, gregarious homemaker raising two boisterous boys: William, two years older than Beatrix, and Gerald, two years younger. Beatrix soon finds herself in a golden, sunlit meadow of protected childhood.

She lives with the Gregorys for five years, becoming as much a part of the family fabric as any of them. She thrives in her American school and comes more alive than ever over the summers, when the family goes to their island off the coast of Vermont and she can forge a shared childhood with the Gregory boys. Life seems to dangle, frozen, and each moment is perfectly captured by Spence-Ash, whose incredibly compelling descriptive narrative opens brief windows into the characters' lives over these years. We also follow Beatrix's parents, back in London, in stark contrast to the life their daughter leads. Though she longs to return home, she is aware that her experiences of growing up will now always be split between two families in two countries — two very different worlds.

The characters' stories do not conclude with the end of the war, however. Spence-Ash takes her readers on a journey spanning decades, first returning to both families in 1951 and then from 1960 to 1965. As Beatrix, William and Gerald grow up, they all must find their places in the world, which is particularly difficult in their post-war context. Together — though thousands of miles apart after Beatrix returns to London — they grieve, both for the people and the childhood they have lost. All three children have experienced the death of family members, and they all feel Beatrix's return to England keenly, as the separation of a unit. As they fight their way through the challenges of adulthood, their voices mature and change with time but stay true to who they are.

By the end of the book, readers will have shed tears of sadness and joy, and fallen in love with each character and their perspective on the world around them. This is especially impressive considering the brevity of the chapters that shift between the points of view of many characters; each is only about six pages long at most. In such short snapshots, Spence-Ash distills a lifetime of personal development, even when skipping years. A truly character-driven novel, Beyond That, the Sea humanizes the struggles of civilians during World War II, particularly those whose childhoods were disrupted by the conflict.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in April 2023, and has been updated for the May 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.