Ocean House Author Series: Debra Curtis, Shannon Garvey, & Jenna Bush Hager

Join us at the UNITED as award-winning author, Deborah Goodrich Royce moderates a conversation with a featured author. This week, debut authors Debra Curtis (Laws of Love and Logic) and Shannon Garvey (June Baby) will be discussing (and signing) their novels. Jenna Bush Hager will be joining Debra and Shannon in conversation with Deborah!

Tickets include wine, light bites, and a signed copy of one of the featured books. Martin House Books will have additional copies of both books available for purchase at the event!

About the Authors:

Debra Curtis is a retired professor of cultural anthropology at Salve Regina University, where she specialized in gender and sexuality. This is her first novel. She is the mother of grown-up twin girls and lives in Rhode Island with her husband. Her featured book is Laws of Love and Logic.

Shannon Garvey received her MFA from the University of New Hampshire, where she taught undergraduate classes. She has published short fiction in The Saturday Evening Post. She grew up in Rhode Island and now lives on the rocky New Hampshire coast. She researched June Baby during many years waiting tables in tourist towns and her time working on Block Island.

Jenna Bush Hager is the co-host of TODAY with Jenna & Sheinelle and the founder of the wildly popular Read With Jenna book club. Since launching the club in 2019, she has selected 87 titles—52 of which have become New York Times bestsellers. In 2022, she launched her production company, Thousand Voices, in partnership with NBCUniversal’s Universal Studio Group. This year, she launched Thousand Voices Books, a co-venture with Random House Publishing Group, through which she publishes books across all its imprints. She has written ten books herself and is a #1 New York Times bestselling author.

Laws of Love and Logic, by Debra Curtis

A STUNNING DEBUT NOVEL FROM JENNA BUSH HAGER’S NEW VENTURE, THOUSAND VOICES

In the serene town of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, Lily Webb is deeply in love with a charismatic boy, a college-bound quarterback whose spectacular athletic talents are matched only by his fierce devotion. But their dreams of a life together are cut short when his passionate protectiveness leads to an irrevocable choice—one that tears them apart and leads Lily down a path of heartbreak from which she may never recover.

Lily already knows the sting of loss, beginning with the death of her mother, a tragedy that left deep scars on both her and her gifted younger sister, Jane. Jane seeks escape in the abstract world of mathematics and quantum mechanics—when she can keep the demons that fuel her addictions at bay. As the years pass, Lily buries her twin griefs deep in her heart, finding solace and a new beginning with Marshall Middleton, a renowned ornithologist whose love is as steadfast as the migration patterns he studies. Yet the shadows of her past linger.

When the boy who was once everything to Lily reappears in her life, she struggles with questions around that terrible night in high school. Can she reconcile the wild wonderment of her first love with the comfort and safety of her second? Laws of Love and Logic explores love’s enduring power and the human spirit’s capacity for forgiveness and redemption.

June Baby, by Shannon Garvey

At seventeen, Ruth lost her mother to cancer, and her father, unable to handle his grieving daughter, shipped her off to Block Island with nothing but a name scribbled on the back of a receipt: Diana Beckett. Diana, a renowned photographer, took Ruth in for the summer, and Block Island became Ruth’s refuge, a place of beauty and creativity, a place where she could nurture her dreams of being a writer, a place where she could fall in love for the first time—with Diana’s nephew, Charlie.

Now, at twenty-seven, Ruth has spent the last ten summers living and working among the lucky few who get to vacation in this wealthy beach town, and the rest of the year just scraping by, yearning to return to the place where she feels safe and unburdened. But then Ruth’s world is upended by tragedy again. Desperate for an anchor, she reaches for the person she’s been pining for since she met him—Charlie—who has his own startling revelation to share. And when another surprise comes in the form of a box left to Ruth by Diana, its contents raise questions about just how well she knew the two women who raised her. Torn between what to believe about her past, and what her future might hold, Ruth is faced with another choice: does she dare to rewrite her story entirely?

Both a heartfelt coming-of-age story and a tender exploration of love and grief, set against a backdrop of golden dunes and seaside sunsets, June Baby shows us what it might look like to embrace a life shaped not by loss, but by possibility.