Janice Kulyk Keefer’s new novel starts out like something by John Updike – young mothers spending the summer at beach cottages and getting together on Friday afternoons to drink gin and to gossip about each other and the characters in the books they exchange while their husbands are at work in the city.

Sex is on their minds, as it is for so many of Updike’s people, but Keefer’s women are far more conventional. It is 1963 – before the Sexual Revolution and the widespread use of the birth control pill. Besides, they were all once good Ukrainian girls, and now their lives are following an upward trajectory toward a Canadian middle-class dream where couples are faithful and neighbours are kindly.

Clouds do appear on the horizon, though. A visiting sister-in-law erupts with a maliciousness that at first is incomprehensible. A husband shocks everyone by falling to his knees and quoting Shakespeare to another man’s wife. The mentally handicapped son of a woman on the fringes of the community is lured into lustfully attacking a boy dressed up like a girl. And everyone is fascinated by the torrid romance between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra.

Keefer was born about the same time as two of the daughters in her story, and she is able to show us what a delight these summers were for the children. She also knows what it’s like to be a young mother, and so she paints an empathetic portrait of the women in her story.

The book closes with two events that spell the end for the close-knit society that spawned the Ladies’ Lending Library. The first concerns child abuse and hints at tensions and stories too harsh to recount on the beach. The second involves a man and a woman choosing passion over a comfortable middle-class life. The last vision Keefer gives us is of one couple – having long languished on the shoals of misunderstanding, now dancing together like young lovers. It satisfies in the way the best sort of summer reading does – like wild strawberries, or blueberries gathered in the sun, or cold spring water gulped on a hot day.