By Ashley Cowger

Many stories arise from the conflict between science and a belief in something unknowable. At no point does this conflict feel as urgent as it does when we are mourning a loved one. For Charlotte, the narrator of Heather Frese’s The Saddest Girl on the Beach (Blair, 2024), no question is more important than how to process and move on from the death of her father without the aid of belief in an afterlife. “My dad believed in science,” Charlotte says. “But science doesn’t believe there’s anything after death.” Frese personifies the distinction between belief in an afterlife and belief in science through Charlotte’s two romantic interests: Michael, a young scientist to whom Charlotte feels an electric pull, and Nate, the religious brother of Charlotte’s best friend who is perfect for her “on paper.” The choice between these two men is much more than a generic rom-com setup, though. Michael and Nate represent two strong opposing forces in Charlotte’s life, two very different ways of dealing with grief.

When Charlotte leaves college to stay at her friend Evie’s family’s inn at Hatteras Island, she offers “life and death” as the reason for her leave of absence from school: the new life growing inside Evie and the death of Charlotte’s father. But really, Charlotte’s time on Hatteras Island is repeatedly referred to as running away. Charlotte is using her stay at the inn as a distraction from her grief, just as she uses the two men she finds herself caught between as a distraction. Michael, like Charlotte’s father, believes in nature and science, and Charlotte feels drawn to him in a way she isn’t to Nate. This draw is not purely intellectual. With Michael, Charlotte feels “a biological need, a necessity born of the magnetic pull between molecules arcing toward one another.” Nate, on the other hand, is an “anchoring presence” in Charlotte’s life, “a life preserver tossed into the current.”

Evie offers Charlotte the opportunity to imagine what life might be like if she were to settle for the wrong man. Charlotte’s time at the beach is spurred by Evie’s unexpected pregnancy, and though nobody but Evie’s mother believes Evie’s boyfriend, Stephen, is right for her, Evie chooses to have the baby and marry Stephen as her religious background dictates. Evie seems caught in a similar riptide as Charlotte, but Evie quickly makes her choice and accepts the consequences, both positive and negative, that result. Unlike in Evie’s case, Charlotte’s choice between science and belief is not easily resolved. Early in the novel, Charlotte says, “I wanted to believe. I couldn’t. And yet I couldn’t not believe, couldn’t go on thinking that nothing of my father remained.” After depositing her father’s ashes in the ocean, Charlotte struggles to view the double rainbow that forms over the water as anything other than “photons, water droplets, reflection, refraction.” Later, she considers that “in forty thousand years, some scientist would amino acid date my dad’s bones that were part of the sea floor, thinking they were shells.”

Frese also uses the beach and its environment to deepen the novel’s exploration. Hatteras Island and its weather are more than just the backdrop of Charlotte’s story. Throughout the novel, the environment is compared to the living beings that inhabit it. At one point, the ocean, which has “eaten the beach,” is described as “gnawing on the sand dunes,” nor’easters are said to be “sneaky,” and the crashing waves are compared to “a tumultuous crowd.” Frese constantly anthropomorphizes Hatteras Island, and the island is used to great effect to reflect the inner turmoil Charlotte experiences after losing her father.

In addition, Frese repeatedly compares the human experience to the beach in text messages between Charlotte and Michael, using excerpts from the University of North Carolina Press book How to Read a North Carolina Beach, which Charlotte and Michael are both reading. For example, Charlotte follows up this quote from that text, “The swash zone is the area on the beach where this thin, relatively smooth, shallow layer of water constantly moves back and forth,” with “I’m the swash zone . . . A shallow layer of grief constantly moving back and forth.” Similarly, Michael quotes from the text to encourage Charlotte in her darkest moments: “The most spectacular changes in beach shape . . . occur in storms,” and “Beaches do not exist in isolation.” This intertextuality weaves together the science of the beach with the inexplicable magic of the human condition, and the blending of scientific fact with deep emotions calls to mind novels like Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt.

In her acknowledgments, Frese states that this novel resulted from “writing my way out of a haze of grief.” It’s no surprise that the story was inspired by Frese’s own journey through and back out of grief. Charlotte’s experiences at Hatteras Island are poignant and thought-provoking, and the book strikes a masterful balance between pain and the moments of levity that inevitably occur after the loss of a loved one. The Saddest Girl on the Beach will surely resonate with anyone who has had to navigate the choppy waters of losing someone they love.

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Ashley Cowger (she/they) is the author of two short story collections: On the Plus Side (Galileo Press) and Peter Never Came (winner of the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize). They work as an Associate Teaching Professor at Penn State Harrisburg.