By: Kitty Turner
Publisher: Daily House
Publication Date: August 26, 2025
ISBN: 978-1733668781
Reviewed by: Ephantus Muriuki
Review Date: September 29, 2025
Kitty Turner’s Day Drinkers drops readers right into the messy, sunburned heart of St. Columba, where tourists, drifters, and locals collide in a haze of heat, booze, and uneasy history. At the center is Gemma, a young woman caught between two worlds - her Vermont upbringing and her Caribbean bloodline - and who’s trying to scrape by selling timeshares by day and drinking too much by night. She’s not a polished protagonist. She’s hungover half the time, defensive, insecure, and stubborn, but that’s what makes her real. Her life feels like a patchwork of contradictions: pitching luxury fantasies to tourists while dumpster-diving for food in the off-season, claiming island identity while still being looked at like an outsider, chasing money while worrying that every opportunity offered to her is actually a trap.
The plot is really pushed forward by two hooks that never quite let go - Vaughn, the local sailor who vanishes without a trace, and Cowboi Rivers, the island’s mythic country star whose shadow looms over everything. Gemma getting pulled into Cowboi’s orbit through the “water taxi” scheme - ferrying young women to his private island, Easter Cay - is where the book sharpens from just sweaty bar scenes into something heavier. Turner plays it smart. She never makes the job cartoonishly evil or the choice simple, instead she lets the moral grayness build as Gemma weighs survival against her conscience. The whole Easter Cay setup becomes less about boats and islands and more about how easy money bends people, especially when desperation is already eating at them.
What’s clever is that these two threads - the missing sailor and the shady side hustle - mirror each other in tone but together, they dig into themes of exploitation, complicity, and temptation without preaching, but rather just showing how ordinary people like Gemma stumble into extraordinary compromises. The prose is rich and sprawling, sometimes almost too lush with detail - long passages about the markets, the cruise ships, the yoga retreat, the dive bars - but it works because the island itself is a character, alive and contradictory, just like the people in it. The world-building mixes the raw and the polished: behind every glossy resort photo there’s a rusting shack, behind every beach party a darker rumor, behind every easy friendship a hint of exploitation. Turner doesn’t clean it up for the reader, and sometimes that unevenness in pacing feels deliberate, like life on the island: fast, intoxicating, and then suddenly bleak.
What kept me hooked was the tension between Gemma’s personal flaws and the wider story swirling around her. There’s a missing friend, shady offers from local power players like Boon, and the looming shadow of Cowboi Rivers’ private island - rumored to be glamorous, corrupt, maybe even sinister. Underneath all that plot is the constant hum of themes, among them: belonging, survival, compromise, and what happens when you drink away your choices until someone else makes them for you.
Quill says: Day Drinkers is less a clean, straight-shot novel and more a messy cocktail, that is, part mystery, part social drama, and part boozy character study and that’s exactly why it lingers. It is a richly atmospheric and character-driven novel perfect for readers who enjoy flawed protagonists, strong senses of place, and stories that live in the morally gray area between right and wrong. Fans of atmospheric literary fiction with elements of mystery and social commentary will find much to savor here. Additionally, readers who like their fiction flawed, sweaty, and morally gray, with a strong sense of place and characters who don’t always make the right call, will probably feel right at home under Kitty Turner’s tarp.
For more information about Day Drinkers, please visit the author's website at: kittyturner.media
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