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A Novel
by Gina Chung
An enchanting novel about Ro, a woman tossed overboard by heartbreak and loss, who has to find her way back to stable shores with the help of a giant Pacific octopus at the mall aquarium where she works.
Ro is stuck. She's just entered her thirties, she's estranged from her mother, and her boyfriend has just left her to join a mission to Mars. Her days are spent dragging herself to her menial job at the aquarium, and her nights are spent drinking sharktinis (Mountain Dew and copious amounts of gin, plus a hint of jalapeño). With her best friend pulling away to focus on her upcoming wedding, Ro's only companion is Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus who also happens to be Ro's last remaining link to her father, a marine biologist who disappeared while on an expedition when Ro was a teenager.
When Dolores is sold to a wealthy investor intent on moving her to a private aquarium, Ro finds herself on the precipice of self-destruction. Wading through memories of her youth, Ro realizes she can either lose herself in the undertow of reminiscence, or finally come to terms with her childhood trauma, recommit to those around her, and find her place in an ever-changing world.
"Delightful and slightly off-kilter... . This off-beat tale has heart." —Publishers Weekly
"Charmingly offbeat... . The self-hating young woman is a familiar figure in recent fiction, but the specifics of Ro's situation and her friendship with Dolores, along with the speculative elements, make Sea Change stand out." —Shelf Awareness
"Gina Chung's Sea Change is both elegant and jagged, sharp and lush. It's so utterly original, with Chung's rich and rewarding prose guiding and charting new territory in love and grief and growth. This novel about settling into yourself, changing alongside your family, eclipsing expectations, and searching for hope in infinitude is humorous and ruminative, transcending genres entirely. Chung's writing is masterful, and Sea Change is glorious." —Bryan Washington, author of Memorial and Lot
"There are no limits to what Chung can do. Her prose is so immersively beautiful that at times I felt swept away in a wave, admiring from underwater, her scintillating refractions of light. Chung's debut is a kaleidoscope of originality. She will enchant you." —Weike Wang, author of Joan is Okay
This information about Sea Change was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Gina Chung is a Korean American writer from New Jersey currently living in Brooklyn, New York. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she is a 2021-2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Catapult, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Idaho Review, The Rumpus, Pleiades, F(r)iction, and Wigleaf, among others, and has been recognized by several contests, including the American Short(er) Fiction Contest, the Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, and the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest.
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