Excerpt from The Last True Poets of the Sea by Julia Drake, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Oh." For the best, maybe. The last thing I needed on my conscience was a child banana-peeling on a sea star and cracking her head open on a rock. "What about the lobster demonstrations?"

"Good memory!" she said. "But, no, we don't do those anymore either. There was an ... incident." She made pincers with her hands and chomped at the air. "I maintain our lobster was provoked, but ..." She shrugged. "We're a little light on the programming this year. But. So happy to have you on board. You're going to do great work here."

Boris raised his wolf-doggy eyebrows. He had me all figured out.

"I've got to go track down your paperwork, but please poke around! Explore. That's what we're here for."

Joan disappeared upstairs, Boris jingling after her. My poking around left me underwhelmed. The aquarium's star attraction was an (admittedly awesome) mammoth blue lobster named Louise, but otherwise, the exhibits were grim. Along one wall, a three-foot-long box of soil and scraggly grass was labeled REEDS AND PLANT LIFE OF THE MAINE COAST. There was an outdated chart of coral reef death titled HELP SAVE OUR ECOSYSTEM, a fairly standard exhibit on the Gulf of Maine, and beside that, SEA MONSTERS OF OLD, which featured some seriously bad artists' renderings of Cassie, the Casco Bay Sea Serpent. Even the small nook of a gift shop was depressing. It sold, along with china Cassies and Lyric Lobsterfest T-shirts, unconscionably phallic stuffed sea cucumbers with googly eyes, no less.

The only exhibit that I lingered over was the History of Lyric display, and that's because it featured my ancestors, the town's founders. A model Lyric steamship sat behind glass, gathering dust on its miniature deck. Beside it, a computerized map charted the ship's course by red dotted line—technology ripped from The Muppet Movie—across the Atlantic, until the line exploded a few miles off the coast of Maine. Tiny animated stick figures bobbed in the water. One flailed for shore. The screen flickered, then rebooted, sending stick-figure Fidelia swimming on an endless loop toward safety.

Sisyphean was the SAT word I was looking for.

I turned to a picture of my great-great-great-grandparents, Fidelia and Ransome, on their wedding day. A copy of this same photograph sat on the cluttered mantel in our living room, but I'd never really studied it. Now I leaned in close. Fidelia was covered in head-to-toe lace, long veil, high-necked dress, a bouquet of flowers spilling over her unseen hands, leaves dangling almost to her knees. Ransome stood beside her, top hat tucked under his arm. It wasn't in fashion to smile for photographs in those days, but his lips curled upward anyway—delighted, I guessed, at his good fortune. I didn't blame him. Even with all the lace, my great-great-great-grandmother was kind of a dish.

The informational plaque dated the photo at five years after the shipwreck. THEIR LOVE WAS OUR BEGINNING, read the caption.

I'd forgotten this was the unofficial town motto. Really great place to turn off the romance channel, Mom.

I was staring at the photograph and trying to figure out if I'd ever look that happy, let alone actually be that happy, when someone tapped my shoulder and said, "Hey, man."

I turned and two things happened at once:

1. The tapper realized I was, in fact, not a man;
2. I realized the tapper was, in fact, a man. Not just any man: the most beautiful man I'd ever seen. Though beautiful man hardly does him justice. Because the tapper was so much more than that. He was a Certifiable Smokeshow and Knee Buckler to End All Knee Bucklers.

He had shaggy brown bedhead, clear olive skin, and green-gray eyes; chapped pink lips, broad shoulders, and a full chest that stretched the cotton of his teal aquarium T-shirt. His eyebrows were truly gorgeous in a way I did not know eyebrows could be: slightly arched and polished, drawing his whole face into focus. A tattoo on his inner arm caught my eye, but he shifted to readjust a large purple lunch box he had over his shoulder, hiding the design before I could make it out. An eco-conscious tattooed eyebrow god? Yes, please.

Excerpted from The Last True Poets of the Sea by Julia Drake. Copyright © 2019 by Julia Drake. Excerpted by permission of Disney-Hyperion. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.