Excerpt from Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

CHAPTER ONE

The day Skipper decides to go and find her oldest sister, Nora, all the mussels are stolen from Gull Gang Rock.

Skipper picks her way along the shore. The rocks are slick with wet seaweed and the retreating ocean tide. Everything gleams in the fading orange-yellow light. Soon it will pour, and she regrets not wearing her rain jacket. She is twenty-two and generally considers herself invulnerable to things as ordinary as weather.

Gull Gang Rock is a particularly large rock jutting out among the waves beneath a ruined wooden pier. Carmen, the middle Shimizu sister, gave it its name when they were younger, based on all the brassy-voiced laughing gulls that hang out there.

Carmen loves naming things. It's her way of claiming ownership, and it's annoying, but the names stick anyway.

For example, Skipper's real name is Rosa, but it's been many years since anyone has called her that. When they started fixing up their boat, Carmen began calling her Skipper as a tease, because it was all Skipper wanted to talk about. The more annoying Skipper found it, the more Carmen used it. But the irritation rubbed smooth over the years, and now all that's left is the residue of affection.

Skipper is medium height and wiry, with short-cropped brown hair, thick eyebrows, and a hunch to her shoulders like she's trying to figure out the secret of evaporating. As that is impossible, she avoids most people instead, which is one reason she is down here by the beach at this particular moment.

As the familiar stink of rotting sargassum fills her nose, something glints in a tidal pool, warm from the afternoon. A half-crushed plastic bottle is caught in the rocks. She reaches out with a long-handled pincher and wrestles it free, tossing it over her shoulder into the sack on her back. It rattles with the few other odds and ends she's found: a comb, a sturdy aluminum bottle, and a doll missing a leg, a head, and most of its clothes. Selling a hundred pieces of garbage will cover a day of their grandma's medication.

A truck comes every other month to haul away plastic, metal, and glass painstakingly skimmed from a giant slurried patch a half day's sail from the harbor. The metal and glass get recycled, the plastic fed to vats of hungry little worms in giant factories up north in the city.

Skipper wishes she were out in the ocean, dragging her nets through gunky water, but a monster storm is on the way, and even Skipper knows better than to be caught out in it. Some people blame the government for overseeding rain clouds this season. On this point, Skipper agrees with Grandma: People should never have gotten into the business of trying to manage the weather.

She's come down to the beach to collect mussels. Guilt pricks her. It's Grandma's birthday, and she should be helping Carmen assemble the meal. But lately all she feels at home is a smothering, like she can't breathe. She doesn't know when it started. Perhaps she's lived her whole life this way and never noticed until now.

Skipper pries a translucent, tattered white bag free. It reads Thank you in purple letters, a polite desire transmitted across the fifty years since plastic bags were ubiquitous. Inside is a half-decomposed baby turtle. She shakes the bag until the fishy carcass tips out.

All morning at home, she waited for a knock, Nora appearing in the doorway just in time for the party. Nora would apologize for not letting them know she was coming home, but she wanted to surprise them. Not that Nora is good at keeping them informed anyway. She is a terrible letter writer.

Nora moved up the coast for college ten years ago. She used to come home for the holidays once or twice a year, greasy-faced from the city air and exhausted from riding in the front bucket seat of an automated commercial truck. It takes her twelve hours of sleep to recover, but it's the cheapest way to travel: a long ten-hour drive over broken highways, with only two stops to recharge. Nora dehydrates herself and abstains from food for a day beforehand and arrives home hungry and parched. Then Grandma fusses over her for a week in a way she never fusses over Carmen or Skipper, until Nora must do the reverse trip all over again.

Excerpted from Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei. Copyright © 2025 by Yume Kitasei. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.