The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club: A Novel

On the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Allied soldiers train for their approaching attacks on the Nazi forces in Europe. They are watched (sometimes too closely for their liking) by the Smith sisters, Cadence and Briar. Cadence is eager to someday move to New York and break into the publishing business; in the meantime, she has begun a book club with some of the local girls. Briar is obsessed by the war and the prospect of U-boat invasions or Fifth Column spies, which irritates most others on the island, who do not believe such things could happen on their island.

For a book filled with the threats of spies and a looming war across the ocean, I found it dull. The characters felt flat, especially the female secondary characters, and the focus of the story drifted too loosely between Cadence and Briar, slowing down both plots and making each feel less important than they might have. The book felt pointless, both in the sense of its own story and in the broader sense of the genre of women’s World War II fiction. It adds very little to the genre as a whole.