On the Same Page By N. D. Galland, William Morrow, 2018, 304 pgs., $15.99.

On the Same Page, the delightful new book by novelist and Vineyard resident N. D. Galland, centers around an unlikely Capulet-Montague rivalry: two Martha’s Vineyard newspapers who have nothing but fishy distrust of each other. Not The Martha’s Vineyard Times and the Vineyard Gazette but rather a fictional blending and meshing of the two as, on the one hand, the larger Newes and on the other, the smaller Journal, both of which have been “defining themselves by their differences” for decades.

“The Journal was not an advertising rag,” as one admittedly biased character in On the Same Page puts it. “The Journal was a scrappy everyman-style paper created by disgruntled former Newes workers who felt the Newes had abrogated its responsibilities to working-class Islanders (who made up the majority of year-rounders) in favor of an elegantly romanticized perception designed to cater to genteel summer residents.”

Ms. Galland plops her heroine, Joanna Howes, squarely into the center of this rivalry. Joanna was born on the Island and left it 18 years ago to become a freelance writer in New York, writing high-profile celebrity pieces for glossy magazines with names like Impeccable. When the novel opens, she’s in her 30s and has no plans to return the Vineyard when suddenly she gets a phone call. Her uncle Hank Holmes, the lovable-but-crusty “town contrarian” who raised her, has broken his leg badly and will be laid up for weeks. Abruptly Joanna finds herself “on a rock in the Atlantic Ocean in midwinter, to take care of a vinegary old crank who would not want her to tell him what to do.”

When she gets the call, Joanna leaves her New York life, including her apartment and her tentative boyfriend Brian (they’re right on the edge of having “The Talk” about their relationship), but when she realizes that she’s going to be tending to Hank for much longer than she first thought, she realizes she’ll need to make money while she’s on the Island, and there’s only one thing she really knows how to do.

She visits the Journal, hoping the paper’s managing editor, her old friend Everett, will have work for her. Luckily, he’s severely understaffed at the moment and has as much work for her as she cares to take on. The problem: it’s still not enough to cover her bills. One solution, that she write pieces for the Newes as well, is out of the question. The Newes is even more fiercely territorial than the Journal. They won’t hire anybody who freelances for the Journal.

The solution: Joey Dias, a pen name that allows her to write for the Newes without the Newes knowing she’s also writing for the Journal, a delicious enough comic premise that Ms. Galland further complicates with a dramatic story of “NIMBY”: Not In My Back Yard. When Joanna arrives on the Island, the West Tisbury Zoning Board is in an ongoing battle with charismatic and super-rich real estate mogul Orion Smith, who’s insisting on landing his private helicopter on his property, in defiance of local bylaws. Against her better judgment, Joanna finds herself covering the story for the Journal, which actually makes this former big-city veteran writer nervous.

“Writing profiles of litigiously narcissistic celebrities wasn’t stressful,” she thinks. “Misrepresenting the neighbor’s opinion on feral turkeys while misspelling his name — that was stressful.”

What unfolds from that early point is far more Pride and Prejudice than Romeo and Juliet. Long before he actually makes an appearance in these pages, every self-respecting Regency romance reader will know what to expect: a dashingly handsome and sharp-tongued Mr. Darcy, both likable and condescending (“I have money,” he tells Joanna, “I have resources, and people hope I’ll do something with it to their benefit”).

Ms. Galland manages it all with a winningly light touch. She has a trenchant understanding of Vineyard life, particularly in the off-season, having lived there herself.

The characters are also uniformly interesting, especially the Vineyard natives like Hank who’ve seen their home become a playground for the super-rich. The Vineyardness of the place comes through loud and clear.

Author N. D. Galland will give a reading at the Martha's Vineyard Playhouse in Vineyard Haven on Sunday, Jan. 20 at 4 p.m.