The first honest day of summer: Ivy Calloway, her brother Theo, and their mother Rosalind drive the coast road down to Tidewater Cove to stay with Marguerite Vanterpool, who has been a second mother to Ivy since before she can remember, and her sons August and Milo. Ivy has spent every August of her life on this stretch of sand, but the first night makes it plain that this one intends to be different.
Included with Lanterna
Ivy’s first day on the cotillion roster turns into an afternoon of fittings, thin sandwiches and polite interrogation, and she starts to wonder whether saying yes to Marguerite’s invitation was ever really her own idea. Then Wes Okonkwo turns up at the boat ramp with a busted outboard and the whole day tilts. Meanwhile Theo is having a summer of his own, and Rosalind meets a novelist who knows exactly which of her books to name.
Included with Lanterna
It’s Ivy’s seventeenth birthday and her oldest friend Priya Raghunathan arrives in Tidewater to make a production of it. The day has always been Ivy’s favourite of the year, but this time she is broadsided by something Priya has been sitting on since March. The cotillion committee wants to know who Ivy is bringing, and by the end of the night Rosalind and Marguerite’s long-kept arrangement is no longer a secret.
Included with Lanterna
The Cove’s bonfire has run every July since the jetty was built, and this year Milo talks Ivy into staying past midnight. August spends the evening pretending not to watch the water. A dropped phone, a borrowed truck and one badly timed sentence rearrange three friendships before the tide comes back in, and Theo learns that a small town keeps receipts.
Included with Lanterna
Ivy walks the floor of the Tidewater cotillion in her mother’s altered dress and finds that the room is far less interested in her than she feared and far more interested in Marguerite than she expected. Priya makes an entrance, Wes makes an apology, and the Vanterpool brothers finally say the thing they have both been circling since the first week of June.
Included with Lanterna