A good beach read is an elusive and yet highly coveted item for many readers. These are slow, almost lazily told stories, yet they’re still engaging and entertaining.
They’re great to take on a vacation or an afternoon off, preferably to read beside a big body of water with a drink nearby and your phone off, leaving the riotous messaging and onerous responsibilities of your regular world behind.
“June Baby” by Shannon Garvey seems to be aiming for that kind of read but ends up giving readers a bumpy ride. In fact, many might find themselves scratching their heads or left with a sour taste in their mouths.
Block Island
The novel certainly chooses a good location for a beach read: a real place called Block Island, Rhode Island. The book describes it as a small town that expands during the warmer, tourist-filled months and is filled with beaches, restaurants, and quiet nights.
The prologue begins with 17-year-old Ruth as her life falls apart in ways she could never have imagined. Arriving by ferry in early June 2013, she’s already a crying, despondent mess; she’s caught in the throes of mourning after her mother, Maggie, passed away from metastatic breast cancer.
Her father, Joel, is unable to manage his daughter’s grief, so he sends her to stay with Diana Beckett, a woman she’s never heard of. Scrawling a phone number on the back of a McDonald’s receipt, he sends her on her way.
Diana, it turns out, was once a friend of Maggie’s. She’s a former Vogue portrait photographer who lives in a weathered beach cottage at the far edge of the island. Ruth arrives with no clear sense of what she’s there for and is not entirely sure Diana knows she’s coming. “It wasn’t that her father was intentionally reckless, but somehow she always ended up fending for herself when he was in charge.”
The novel then jumps forward a decade. Ruth, now 27, has spent the intervening years in a “bifurcated life,” spending summers waitressing on Block Island and winters tending bar in a small Maine navy town. She’s been held in place by sheer inertia and a deep attachment to Diana and to the island itself.
Now, she’s a mess again. She returns to Block Island in early June after she learns Diana’s died of lung cancer, quietly and alone, without telling anyone she was sick.
No-Time Charlie
During her island years, Ruth’s had a long, undefined relationship with Charlie, Diana’s nephew, who visits each summer. They have what Ruth’s friend calls “an emotional affair,” as if they were cheating on their significant others yet not caring if their so-called others even exist.
Their relationship is comprised of “a smattering of almosts”: years of phone calls, near-misses, and one near-kiss that neither of them has ever addressed.
Ruth resolves to make up for the wasted time and tell him that she loves him. Unfortunately, Charlie arrives on the island for Diana’s funeral with his fiancée, Nadia, and the confession collapses before it begins.
Diana’s literary agent then contacts Ruth with an unusual, posthumous commission: a major profile of Diana’s life and work for Vogue, to be published alongside a forthcoming exhibition. Ruth, who hasn’t written seriously in years, balks. Besides, she’ll have to deal with Diana’s sister (Charlie’s mother), Lynn, who’s long disapproved of the island and even called Ruth a freeloader.
Unsurprisingly, Ruth relents and takes the assignment. But the effort could open up a whole new can of worms for everyone.
Discordant Choices
“June Baby” has a lot going for it. It features a moderate pace that’s mostly contemplative and sorrowful, filled with a quiet yearning for the things lost and time wasted yet still seeking a worthy path for the future.
However, Garvey’s characters also frequently make unseemly, poor choices and dabble in selfish, questionable morality. Soon after Ruth resolves to confess her deepest, most secret feelings to her supposed true love, she has sex with an old flame. Neither she nor the author seems to grasp the irony of this choice.
The book also features occasional drug use, a de rigueur secret gay relationship involving one of the secondary characters, an out-of-place slam of the Catholic faith, and several other choices (including the termination of a character’s pregnancy) that become jarring and garish for such a quiet promise made at the beginning of the book.
More’s the pity, because the book ultimately has a strong, positive sentiment at its core: to choose living instead of hiding, rejecting the idea of burying yourself in your grief and instead learning to embrace life.
However, like many authors today, Garvey seems incapable or unwilling to explore these ideas in a mature, straightforward, or creative way. Too many modern writers feel the need to resort to shock-and-awe—figuratively bombing their story with crass, pseudo-edginess—when all that was needed was a quiet place to think, observe, and be truthful with oneself.
When readers look for an engaging book and get this kind of treatment, the writer has struck a poor chord.
‘June Baby: A Novel’
By Shannon Garvey
Random House: May 12, 2026
Hardcover, 352 pages
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