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There are terraces with drooping vines, suggestive glances enough to rival an arthouse film, and flattering candlelight galore.

Accompanied by Max’s enigmatic half-sister Alma, the quintet embarks upon a marathon of open-sea sailing, open-air dining, late night dancing, debilitating hangovers and magical mornings after.

Max and Clara are hard-partying Manhattan swingers capable of setting the sleepy town ablaze. After almost cutting their trip short-the couple grows weary of the town and, ominously, each other-they stumble into another young couple staying down the block and are quickly enveloped by their jet-set lifestyle. Tellingly, they’re both virgins when they step off the train at Cape May Terminal.Ĭheek’s scenery is luxuriant, and his cast chews it adeptly. Just out of high school, their union is predicated upon small-town convention and pragmatic if not-so-deeply felt passion. But the skimpy preparation they made for their honeymoon dwarfs whatever was applied to their impending marriage. Newlyweds Henry and Effie, devout Christians from rural Georgia, might have planned their honeymoon a bit more strategically: arriving in early autumn to find a summer town nearly deserted. With his debut Cape May, Chip Cheek relies on the setting (coastal southern New Jersey) and year (1957, or exactly equidistant between WWII and Vietnam, for anyone counting) to take care of the “rustic” part. How to summon art from books meant to relax rather than provoke, ones meant to share canvas totes with grainy towels and greasy sunscreen bottles? The challenge, for the rare novelist who seeks it, becomes making a statement within such established framework. Pick any sandy-covered 300-pager off your local bookseller’s seasonal shelf and chances are you’ll find an alluring if unalarming tale of White People Behaving Badly, gin-suffused days on a rustic I-95-adjacent shoreline, sumptuous adultery neatly playing itself out between Memorial and Labor Days. Given how integral it is to the publishing industry’s bottomline, the Beach Read assumes a precise blueprint to minimize risk and maximize profit.