Summertime on Rhode Island’s luxurious Aquidneck Island. A middle-class Cuban American—freshly graduated from college—reckons with his fragile standing among the wealthy community in which he was raised, from which he might be cast out before the summer ends. Raymond Wilson-Domingo has never felt entirely comfortable among the elitist crowd of Newport’s old-money aristocracy—partly because he's Cuban, partly because of his modest upbringing in the city’s undesirable Fifth Ward neighborhood. But this summer, Ray's job at a boutique wine shop, a lobster theft, a misguided plan to become a lawyer, an exclusive beach club, an ill-timed car crash, the Moon View mansion’s mysterious and controversial new resident, and a doomed romance with the doyenne of Newport—not to mention the impending Campbell-Doheny wedding and all of the money, gossip, and drama which surrounds it—will collide, casting the differences between Ray and his peers in high relief. Ray would do anything to cement his place among New England’s most elite social circles, but will it ever be enough?
Freshly graduated from college and unsure what the fall will bring, the end of the summer looms on his horizon, inciting in Ray a fear that by September, social and economic realities will label him unworthy of the glitzy world to which he has briefly—almost accidentally—gained access.
