It\u2019s 1979, and Bonnet Shores is slowly knitting itself back together after last summer\u2019s rash of home invasions. The perpetrators were caught, and while alarm systems now protect windows such as 15-year-old Maddie Grove\u2019s, she\u2019s happy to once again have the freedom to stay out late with her friends, and have her crush visit her secretly at night. But then, one July night, Maddie\u2019s 12-year-old sister, Christina, fails to come home. The members of the local beach club, owned by the Mancini family, immediately organize searches, and the Groves\u2019 neighbor, Diana Gonz\u00e1lez, who\u2019s studying criminal justice in college, helps liaise with the police department. Christina\u2019s disappearance draws attention to the darker undercurrents of life in sunny, idyllic Bonnet; most particularly, the way men watch girls walk around in their bathing suits, whispering about jailbait. Four strong women\u2014Diana, Maddie, Joan Mancini (who married into the beach club family), and wealthy Cricket Kelly\u2014carry the narrative as Freitas jumps from the summer of 1979 to the previous summer of break-ins to earlier summers that defined Joan\u2019s and Cricket\u2019s lives and back again, weaving both a coming-of-age tale and a fight-against-power story rooted in violence and normalized misogyny\u2014but driven by resilience, love, and these women\u2019s desire to take their bodies back from the male gaze. Freitas grew up in Rhode Island herself, and there\u2019s a bittersweetness to the novel; it celebrates people\u2019s memories of paradise as well as the moment scales fall from their eyes, celebrating the strength and bonds of sisterhood forged in loss and knowledge.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s 1979, and Bonnet Shores is slowly knitting itself back together after last summer\u2019s rash of home invasions. The perpetrators were caught, and while alarm systems now protect windows such as 15-year-old Maddie Grove\u2019s, she\u2019s happy to once again have the freedom to stay out late with her friends, and have her crush visit her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7753,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7752"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}