There’s a moment in local author Ashley Ream’s new novel when Anita, a solitary grocer on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, panics before the arrival of her 14-year-old houseguest. She’s buying toothpaste. Cereal. Cleaning obsessively. “She’s convinced the whole thing is going to end in disaster,” Ream says. “And honestly? That panic is pretty universal. It doesn’t matter if the child you’re about to bring home is 14 years old or 14 days old. The responsibility hits you like a wave.”
Few writers balance vulnerability and wit like Ream, and in “The Peculiar Gift of July” (out July 1 from Dutton), she does so with a storyteller’s lightest touch. The book follows July, a recently orphaned teen with a quiet but uncanny intuition. She arrives in Ebey’s End — a fictional, fog-draped island town off the coast of Washington — and begins quietly reshaping the community. Her tools? A few words. A well-timed magazine. A coconut cream pie.
The setting may be fictional, but the emotional terrain of “The Peculiar Gift of July” is rooted in real, lived feeling: grief, caregiving, community and the ways we find family in the most unexpected places.
“I keep coming back to the same themes,” Ream, who lives outside Seattle in “a small house in the big woods,” says. “Loneliness and its antidote. Found family. The complicated beauty of caregiving, especially when it’s not a role you chose.”
Anita certainly doesn’t choose it. The town’s only grocer, she’s constructed a life of careful solitude, built entirely on observing people without ever truly connecting. But when July shows up — full of pain, quiet resilience and a strange gift that allows her to sense what people need — everything changes. Bit by bit, July’s “peculiar” offerings begin to ripple across the island.
The book’s magical realism is subtle, more sparkle than spectacle. “I call it a sprinkle of fairy dust,” Ream says. “The more charming the setting, the more emotional weight the story can carry. Readers might think they’re picking up a sweet book about pie and small-town charm, but by the end, they’ve been through grief, infidelity, identity, aging and reconciliation. It sneaks up on you.”
It’s also deeply funny. Ream has a sharp eye for the odd rhythms of community life. In Ebey’s End, the ferry is unreliable, the postman’s chickens are everyone’s business and even the pharmacist’s name is up for debate. “Small towns let me write about people who have to work things out face-to-face,” she says. “You can’t ghost someone you’re going to see every day until you die.”
Ream’s long love affair with the San Juan Islands and Whidbey Island, places she visited for years before moving to the Pacific Northwest, inspires the isle setting. “I didn’t know so many shades of green existed,” she says. “Even when I lived in L.A., I wrote my way toward the coast. Before I could live here, I lived here in my imagination.”
A former journalist and the author of “Losing Clementine” and “The 100 Year Miracle,” Ream is no stranger to emotional complexity. But she says “The Peculiar Gift of July” gave her the chance to explore a new kind of intimacy, particularly in the book’s layered, evolving relationships.
One of her favorites is the prickly bond between Anita and her estranged childhood friend, Carol. “It’s a relationship built on history that’s never forgotten, but still repaired,” she says. “There’s something so powerful about choosing to carry the past together.”
Ream is also proud of how Anita and July’s relationship unfolds. Not as a traditional mother-daughter dynamic, but something uniquely theirs. “It’s not one-sided,” she says. “They’re learning about each other. Building something. And by the end, what they’ve created together feels really hard-won and beautiful.”
As for the origin of July’s mysterious gift, Ream says it started with a story she once read about police departments consulting psychics in cold cases. “That detail doesn’t appear in the book, but it was the penny that sparked the story,” she says. “I carry these little curiosities around in my pocket for years. Eventually, they start to shimmer.”
The shimmer is everywhere in “The Peculiar Gift of July.” It’s in the scent of cardamom from the bakery. In the lonely ache of people trying to do right by each other. In the way a town, however eccentric, can knit itself back together around the edges of a heartbreak.
Ream doesn’t promise that everything gets wrapped up neatly. “Real life’s not like that,” she says. “But I do believe in hard-won joy. In second chances. And in pie, obviously.”