The Island Club
On 1956 Balboa Island, tucked into a bay off the Southern California coast, is a golden beach town with streets named for gemstones. The three protagonists of The Island Club, Milly, Sylvia, and Adele, each look to the town as an anchor of sorts. Milly thinks their move there will settle her movie industry husband down and distract him from alluring actresses. Sylvia is secure in her role as the reigning queen of island society. Adele, a prickly outsider, has found the anonymity she needs there.
All three find themselves keeping increasingly untenable secrets as they form a friendship that centers around tennis and the Island Club, which is Sylvia’s husband’s reckless financial venture. How much most women did not know about their own family bank accounts, generally in the husband’s name in 1956, is clear, and part of what drives the action. Only Adele, grimly determined to shed her past and vanish, has a grip on her own finances.
The sense of time and place is skillfully created through fashion, social conventions, dinner menus, and small vignettes from tennis lessons to grocery shopping that subtly point out annoyances the women are trained to take for granted. Told in close third person in alternating chapters from each woman’s point of view, Milly, Sylvia, and Adele’s attempts to grasp some agency for themselves will resonate with any woman who has had to sort out something that should have been her business from the start, but that a man has made a hash of.
All is resolved in the end, financially and romantically, and if there is a bit of a “Silvia, Adele, and Milly save the show” trope, we root for these women to do just that.
