Sea Creatures

Summary (from the publisher): A mother must make the unthinkable choice between her husband and her son in this riveting domestic drama, the follow up to the author's "exquisite debut" (Publishers Weekly), Stiltsville.

When Georgia returns to her hometown of Miami, her toddler son and husband in tow, she is hoping for a fresh start. They have left Illinois trailing scandal and disappointment in their wake: Graham's sleep disorder has cost him his tenure at Northwestern; Georgia's college advising business has gone belly up; and three-year old Frankie is no longer speaking. Miami feels emptier without Georgia's mother, who died five years earlier, but her father and stepmother offer a warm welcome - as well as a slip for the dilapidated houseboat Georgia and Graham have chosen to call home. And a position studying extreme weather patterns at a prestigious marine research facility offers Graham a professional second chance.

When Georgia takes a job as an errand runner for an artist who lives alone in the middle of Biscayne Bay, she's surprised to find her life changes dramatically. Time spent with the intense hermit at his isolated home might help Frankie gain the courage to speak, it seems. And it might help Georgia reconcile the woman she was with the woman she has become.

But when Graham leaves to work on a ship in Hurricane Alley and the truth behind Frankie's mutism is uncovered, the family's challenges return, more complicated than before. Late that summer, as a hurricane bears down on South Florida, Georgia must face the fact that her choices have put her only child in grave danger.

Sea Creatures is a mesmerizing exploration of the high stakes of marriage and parenthood, the story of a woman coming into her own as a mother, forced to choose between her marriage, her child, and the possibility of new love.

Review: I received an Advance Reader Copy from HarperCollins. 

This book pulled me in from the beginning, with phrases like "the steeped-tea sunlight of early evening" catching my eye as early as page nine. In Sea Creatures, Georgia tells her story about her disrupted life after her husband Graham, who suffers from parasomnia, has an incident that costs him tenure and leads to them leaving Chicago in disgrace. To make matters worse, their son, three year old Frankie, has stopped speaking. 

Most of the character details in this book are fairly eccentric. Georgia's father is a lifelong musician, wandering from band to band, Georgia herself chooses to work for Charlie, an artist but also a hermit, and Georgia and her husband met because they both suffer from insomnia and encountered one another at a sleep clinic. Yet Georgia draws attention to and reflects on how others view her and her idiosyncrasies, saying "we were referred to as 'eccentric neighbors,' which I never understood. Surely, to be labeled as such, there must have been something other than Graham's parasomnia. Did it have to do with the fact that I hadn't grown up in the area? Was it Graham's prematurely white hair, his all-season bicycling and refusal to drive a car? Was there something about us I didn't recognize, some odd mannerism or behavior? It was more likely sloppy reporting than anything else, but still, I was humiliated" (138). I like how introspective and vulnerable Georgia seems. She does not seem to take anything about herself from her mother's opinion of her to what kind of mother she herself is for granted.

The character that remained the biggest enigma for me was Graham. I never understood what he felt for Georgia, why Georgia was interested in him, or even what Graham was studying in terms of weather patterns. In addition to his odd behavior brought on by his sleep disorder, Graham is reckless and seems to care little for his son. It seems as if a critical juncture in their marriage is reached when Graham and Georgia make different decision while kayaking in the Keys. Graham wants to press on, even in the face of an oncoming storm, while Georgia decides to go back. Motherhood has made her more cautious as she she says "the stakes, [...] they're higher now" (130). Georgia reflects on how they have diverged and how their marriage has changed, "For years, I'd trusted him nearly blindly. Life with Graham had always been filled with small excitements, like walking the frozen lake behind the cottage as the ice groaned and cracked under our feet" (130). Although Georgia claims to reserve judgment about her marriage until later, it seems as if her choice that day spells out her later actions. 

However, this book lost steam for me after the first half. The central conflict - what caused Frankie's mutism and what Georgia is going to do about it - seems like not a conflict at all. In a few pages, Georgia shuts the book on that story line, and abruptly decides her course of action, with seemingly little reflection, which seems out of character for her - "What happened next, I'll tell quickly, because it's difficult for me to do any other way" (223). Georgia abruptly decides that her sin was marrying a reckless man, and choosing to have a child in a reckless home.    

I liked the title's relevance to the setting and plot of the novel, and it centered in until the end, with the force of Hurricane Andrew that sweeps through the landscape. Harry, the recluse Georgia works for, is an artist who draws different sea creatures, Harry gives Frankie plastic sea animals to play with throughout the book, the novel is set largely on the ocean or on a houseboat, and hidden demons are confronted. Yet the ocean's involvement in the conclusion of Graham's tale was perplexing to me. It seemed not only slightly improbably but Georgia seems largely unaffected by it. 

While the writing style and characters of this book drew me in, the lack of coherence of the plot prevented me from awarding this read more stars. 

Stars: 3