In 1942, 16-year-old Briar Smith celebrates her brother’s 20th birthday in the barn on Copper Pond Farm. Briar also has a 19-year-old sister, Cadence. Their parents died in a car accident when Briar was six, so they live with Gram on the farm.

There are many worries. The Nazis are “terrorizing Europe,” Gram has a heart condition, and German U-boats attack nearby American ships. Briar keeps spotting U-boats. She reports them to the tip line, but they don’t believe her, and people have begun calling her “Briar the Liar.”

After Pearl Harbor, Tom joined the Army, but Gram’s illness allowed him to come home. Tom plans to give a speech. Briar thinks he’ll announce his engagement to Bess Ann Stanhope, who left her affluent Edgartown family and has been living with the Smiths. Instead, Tom says the Army has assigned him to 75th Ranger Regiment (a unit that specializes in dangerous missions), and he’s leaving tomorrow.

Cadence and Bess work at Bayside Beach Club—the Bay, for short. The Bay is a private beach-and-sailing club, and with the male members fighting in World War II or away on war business, Cadence feels like the Bay resembles a summer camp for affluent women. Bess calls the women “Richies.” Bess and Cadence are best friends. Their favorite “Richie” is Winnifred Winthrop—Winnie—who tips them generously and shares her Vogue magazines.

The Bay women have a book club, and some of the women secretly pay the exceptionally well-read Cadence to pen summaries and reviews so that they don’t have to read the book. The women give her more money than Bay’s manager Oscar Wespi, whom Cadence portrays as severe and crass.

Bess and Cadence take the books that the members leave behind. They also find books at “the dump.” As the Bay Women read Fran Werfel’s religious novel The Song of Bernadette (1941), Bess and Cadence plan to start their own book club, the Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club, and ban Richies.

Copper Pond Farm is “Up-Island,” in what was then the rural, less affluent part of Martha’s Vineyard. Cadence delivers news about Up-Island in her Vineyard Gazette column, “Up-Island Happenings.” Winnie compliments the column and admits that she read Cadence’s review of William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury (1929), which she wrote for a book club member. Winnie invites Cadence to the exclusive Edgartown Yacht Club so that Winnie can introduce Cadence to two of her friends who work for the publishing company G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Cadence dreams of living in New York and working in publishing.

Briar was friendly with their older neighbor Conrad Schmidt before he died. Briar and Mr. Schmidt discussed “war strategy.” Mr. Schmidt’s grandson is 18-year-old Tyson Schmidt, and Tyson lives in Mr. Schmidt’s luxurious second home in Vineyard Haven. The Schmidts are German, and Tyson is in the Army.

Authorities outlaw shortwave radios for the general population, but they let fishermen and Gram use them to “monitor” the waters and report suspicious activity. Gram hates the noisy shortwave, but Briar uses it. She talks to fishermen and listens to a story about U-boat men seizing the dinner of a Portuguese fisherman.

Briar finds a suspicious metal box in Mr. Schmidt’s medicine cupboard. Returning to investigate it, she runs into Tyson, who’s with his romantic partner Shelby Parker. Briar views Tyson as smart and Shelby as vain and unthinking. Shelby’s father works for Ford Motors in Detroit, a company whose owner, Henry Ford, is antisemitic and sympathetic to Hitler.

Tyson’s parents plan to sell Mr. Schmidt’s less valuable primary home, but they’re traveling, so Tyson has to deal with it. Briar offers to help, and Shelby invites Briar to her parents’ clambake, but Briar, not relating to people her age, turns down the invitation. With Tyson and Shelby gone, Briar returns to the mysterious box. It says “Purser’s Office” in German, and there’s something inside it.

US soldiers come to Martha’s Vineyard to engage in war games in preparation for invasions in Western Europe or North Africa. They establish a base on Peaked Hill, and Bess appreciates the presence of men, who earn the nickname Cape Cod Commandos.

A Bay customer found sand in her child’s ice cream, and Mr. Wespi made Bess and Cadence reclean the ice cream machine, preventing Cadence from meeting Winnie’s publishing friends. Using oolong tea, Gram predicts the future. She has correctly foretold the car crash and Briar’s broken rib, but she can’t say if Cadence will ever move to New York City. 

Major John Gilbert is British and in charge of the soldiers. He visits the Smith farm and warns that he may have to use some of the land. Cadence objects. Before Tom left, he planted Burbank potatoes, and the Smith family needs the potatoes to grow so they can sell them. If Major Gilbert’s soldiers ruin the fields, they’ll push the Smith family into “poverty,” and Cadence will call out Major Gilbert in her column.

Gram tries to soothe the tension by having Cadence give Major Gilbert a tour of Martha’s Vineyard, but Major Gilbert declines. He also doesn’t want Cadence to bring books to the soldiers. Gram thinks Cadence and Major Gilbert will marry. Gram believes, “[I]f you can’t move heaven, then just raise hell” (95).

Briar works at the Van Ryper Model Company, where she makes precise miniature models of enemy ships so Americans can identify them. Mr. Reed, Briar’s boss, is relatively laid back and lets Briar enter the “classified room” without signing in. She stuffs a German list of combinations down her shirt, hoping that one of the combinations will open Mr. Schmidt’s box.

Jerry Whitcom, Briar’s 30-year-old coworker, sneakily enters the room and wonders why Briar is in the German section when she’s working on a Japanese model. Briar acts confused. Jerry moves on to Briar’s style, making fun of her for wearing men’s clothes like Joan of Arc. Before Captain Frank McManus, the FBI chief in Martha’s Vineyard, enters the shop, Jerry also mentions a U-boat sighting.

Briar presents McManus as slovenly and dense. He’s condescending to Briar and implies that Mr. Schmidt supported the Nazis. Mr. Reed defends Briar and criticizes McManus for arresting Bert the Barber due to Bert’s Italian identity. McManus mentions the fifth column—the myth of an organized faction within the US secretly working for the enemy—and he and Mr. Reed search Briar and the other employees. They don’t find the classified documents on Briar. However, McManus wants new fingerprints from Briar. He also wants her to stop calling in false sightings of U-boats.

The chapter ends with Cadence’s column, “Up-Island Happenings.” As promised, she makes fun of Major Gilbert and his soldiers, who are reading War and Peace. She gives away a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and she confirms that Martha’s Vineyard remains a fun vacation spot.

As Cadence found three copies of The Song of Bernadette at the Bay, the book is the first book for the Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club. The club consists of Cadence, Bess, and 21-year-old Margaret Coutinho, a member of the island’s Portuguese fishing community. Maragaret has a specific, high-minded view of book clubs that Bess gently knocks down. Since no one has read Bernadette, the women complain about the lack of new books. They then swim in Cooper Pond before driving to Peaked Hill to deliver old books that Cadence has collected for the soldiers.

Cadence lies and says Major Gilbert permitted her to enter. The women hand out a variety of books, including Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and T. S. Eliot poems. One soldier wants F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), but they don’t have that novel. Major Gilbert arrives and scolds Cadence. He threatens to take the entire Smith farm.