My Rating: ★★★☆☆
June Baby by Shannon Garvey is a Block Island coming-of-age novel about grief, first love, and the secrets we keep from the people who raised us — and it is, by nearly every account a beautiful book.
But, I didn’t love it.
And I think a fair amount of that is on me, not the book — more on that in a moment too.
Reader beware — spoilers are ahead!
The Book
Ruth loses her mother, Maggie, to cancer at seventeen. Her father, unable to sit with his daughter’s grief, ships her off to Block Island with nothing but a name on the back of a receipt: Diana Beckett, a renowned photographer and old friend of Maggie’s. Diana takes her in for the summer, and the island becomes Ruth’s refuge — a place to write, to grieve sideways instead of head-on, and to fall for Diana’s nephew, Charlie.
A decade later, twenty-seven-year-old Ruth is still orbiting the island every June, still scraping by the rest of the year, when tragedy pulls her back for good: Diana has died, and Ruth learns it secondhand, having last spoken to her in an unresolved fight at Christmas. She returns hoping to finally tell Charlie how she feels — only to find he has a revelation of his own.
Book Club Discussions
I owe you an apology on this one! Because I finished so late in the month, I never got the DBQs up in time for anyone to actually discuss them with me — so this month’s book club is really just me, thinking out loud, instead of the usual chorus of your voices in the comments. I missed that. Please still tell me what you thought, even without a prompt to answer!
A few things I underlined, sat with, and haven’t stopped thinking about:
Two lines that stopped me cold:
“Growing up, Ruth had often felt like a sieve, her thoughts and feelings bleeding out of her so that they never seemed like just her own.”
“She listened, not as if she was waiting to reply but as if she was really curious about what you were going to say next, as if she could learn something from everyone she talked to.”
Where I found that Garvey’s world-building felt a little thin, her instinct for relational complexity — the specific, hard-to-name texture of what makes someone feel truly known — is genuinely sharp. She may not have given me Block Island in three dimensions, but she gave me sentences that capture intimacy more than most novels manage in a whole chapter.
On Reading This Right After Hilderbrand
I’ll be honest about the confounding variable: I read June Baby in the middle of an Elin Hilderbrand binge. Hilderbrand is the reigning queen of the beach read for a reason — Nantucket isn’t backdrop in her novels; it’s an omnipresent character, rendered in scrumptious, specific detail down to the restaurant orders and beach picnics and bedroom nightstands.
Reading June Baby back-to-back against Hilderbrand, Block Island never quite escaped Diana’s cottage. I could picture the inside of that house in detail. I struggled to picture the island around it. Where Nantucket sprawls, Block Island — in my read, anyway — stayed a setting rather than part of the cast. I’d be curious whether that’s the book, or whether it’s just impossible odds, reading a debut immediately after a Hilderbrand marathon.
I don’t think June Baby is a bad book. I think it might be a book I read at the wrong moment, back to back with a writer who has spent two decades perfecting the art of making a single square mile of sand feel infinite. That’s not really a fair fight for a debut novelist to walk into. I’d actually love to reread this one in isolation, months from now, away from the Nantucket haze, and see if it lands differently.
If You Liked June Baby, May I Recommend:
The Five Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand
If what you’re craving is exactly the island-as-character immersion I found myself missing here, go straight to the source and pick up an Elin Hilderbrand — The Five Star Weekend is a perfect entry point, with all the same ingredients (grief under the surface, a wealthy summer enclave, a secret that reorders everything) but with Nantucket rendered in that unmistakable, scrumptious detail. Bonus timing: it’s becoming a Peacock series starring Jennifer Garner, premiering July 9 — so you can read it now and watch it approximately five minutes later!
July Book Club: Cast Your Vote!
The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett — The long-awaited (seventeen years!) sophomore novel from the author of The Help, set in 1933 Oxford, Mississippi, where an orphaned girl, an outspoken sister, and an enterprising woman find their fates colliding as the Great Depression tightens its grip. Big, sweeping, character-driven Southern fiction.
Dolly All the Time by Annabel Monaghan — A GMA Book Club pick: a hardworking single mom returns to her seaside Rhode Island hometown for the summer and falls into a fake-dating arrangement with the town’s wealthy, workaholic heir. Warm, funny, and the most purely escapist of the three.
Whistler by Ann Patchett — Her tenth novel: a woman in her fifties has a chance reunion at the Met with the stepfather she hasn’t seen in decades, and the two revisit the accident that bonded — and separated — them. Quiet, literary, and already being called one of the best books of the year.
P.S. I promise to always keep The Lauren Letter free as my little exercise of trying to make the world a bit more beautiful. If, in return, you could considering giving this post a “like” or share with a friend, it would just mean the world to me.
