Sci-Fi, Romance, and Starting Over

 

Image copied from NetGalley

Thank you to NetGalley, Hyperion Press, and Emily Jane for allowing me to read a free eGalley of this novel in exchange for this honest review.

Here Beside the Rising Tide by Emily Jane Is an interesting mix of genres and themes. It reads sort of like a season of Stranger Things if Nancy became a romantic suspense novelist instead of a reporter and was stuck on one of the small barrier islands along the southeastern seaboard with a sea monster while having a middle-life crisis. There is a lot going on in this novel, and it is definitely unique in all that is tries to accomplish.

At first, it started off really strong for me as a reader. I was excited to see how things unfolded. The novel opens with Jenni as a ten-year-old, enjoying life on Pearl Island where she lives with her single mom. Reading about her childhood at the start of her summer vacation was nostalgic for me as Jane paints a very rich and fully developed world with her depiction of Jenni's island life. It put me squarely in this setting and had me reminiscing about family vacations on similar islands to Pearl Island along the coastline of the Carolinas or Georgia. We know from the first, as well, that things will suddenly change once Jenni meets and befriends Timmy Caruso who is on Pearl Island on vacation with his family. It isn't a spoiler to say that things do take a turn for Jenni when her new best friend disappears. From there we jump ahead to Jenn, now a successful writer, facing the end of her marriage and the possible loss of custody to her children. In response to this, she decides to return to her childhood home and spend the summer there with her kids to try and reconnect with them and also to escape the dumpster fire she feels her life has become. Shortly after her arrival, a boy shows up in the ocean at night near her vacation rental. The boy claims to be Jenn's long-lost best friend Timmy Caruso. The kicker is that Timmy is still the same exact age he was when he disappeared. He's even wearing the same swim trunks, goggles, and flippers that Timmy was when he vanished.

There are many things that this novel does well. The way the author vividly paints the setting of this island at the beginning of the novel and later when Jenn returns makes it easy to visualize this place through the character's eyes. It was also fun to read some excerpts of Jenn's popular romantic suspense series throughout the story as Jenn comes to terms with so many things in her life that she's tried to avoid, such as the loss of her mother, her waning interest in the character that has made her a bestselling author, and her dissolution of her marriage and in some regards her relationship with her kids. The introduction of the strange sea life that Jenn encounters on Pearl Island as a child and later with her kids as an adult is also well portrayed. We aren't sure at first how benevolent some of these alien sea creatures are or how they are tied to the scarier sea creature that has shown up in the depths near this island. There are also some really beautiful moments where the author portrays Jenn's almost existential struggles and ties them to the reappearance of Jenn's best friend Timmy, still as a ten-year-old boy, and these sci-fi sea creatures. As with this quote here:

"...as a woman on a beach, feet in the sand, sun on her face, hair blown back by the ocean breeze while the weird squids sloshed along the shore, ....; as the future of a girl with a best friend and a pair of shovels and the dream of a hole in the sand, big enough to sit in for a picnic lunch. It didn't matter that the ocean would wash the hole away. She could find herself down there, the small pearl of her deepest small self. Smooth around the edges, like a piece of sea glass. Not new, but still bright."

As the story unfolds, Jenn's grief is inextricably tied to the disaster of the sea monster that wants to destroy the world, and Jane portrays this with some lovely and heartbreaking prose such as in this moment when Jenn discusses the loss of her mother with someone who knew her:

"Not close. But I knew Maureen. She was lovely. I'm so sorry--"

"Thanks. Me too."

"And so young. I--I guess you never know what will happen. You try your best and have hope, but sometimes, no matter what you do--"

"The unstoppable beast shows up."

All that being said, I found the midpoint of the story, once Jenn returns to the island, to drag on. She spends much of the novel from that point, continuing to avoid her problems while also obsessing over them and questioning everything she's doing. And while this was marketed in part as a romance, I didn't see much romance developing throughout most of the story until almost the very end. I feel like there were many missed opportunities for character development for both the adult Jenn and for her love interest Dax. For instance, one of the things that becomes clear is that she has buried her grief at losing her mother and has never really processed that. As a reader, I was expecting to have more of this happen with Jenn as she decides what to do with her mother's empty home. But we only really see her breakdown and acknowledge how much she misses her mom in one brief scene and then near the end of the novel. So, that thread isn't given the full development it could have been. As for Jenn's relationship with Dax, he's described by her mainly as the hot contractor that she calls on for help whenever she doesn't know who else to turn to. In most of the book he is the equivalent of eye candy who is a last resort source of aid and not much more. They sort of develop a friendship, I suppose, but it's a surface element more than an actual romantic plot point. I also think the pacing of the story would have been better if it had been a shorter novel. So, while I did enjoy the beginning and found the ending to be a satisfying conclusion, I struggled to get through most of the story in between. For that reason, I only rated this one a 3 out of 5 stars. After reading the reviews of others, I had really hoped to enjoy this more.

Still, if you like novels that have crossover elements, in this case sci-fi, light romance, and starting over, components, then you might give Here Beside the Rising Tide by Emily Jane a try.

My next review for the beginning of February will be a middle grade contemporary fantasy, Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston. I'm really excited about this one as I'm hoping it will make for a good mentor text for my current work-in-progress, which is an upper middle grade urban fantasy. Check out the cover and blurb, both copied from Goodreads, below.

Quinton Peters was the golden boy of the Rosewood low-income housing projects, receiving full scholarship offers to two different Ivy League schools. When he mysteriously goes missing, his little sister, 13-year-old Amari Peters, can’t understand why it’s not a bigger deal. Why isn’t his story all over the news? And why do the police automatically assume he was into something illegal?

Then Amari discovers a ticking briefcase in her brother’s old closet. A briefcase meant for her eyes only. There was far more to Quinton, it seems, than she ever knew. He’s left her a nomination for a summer tryout at the secretive Bureau of Supernatural Affairs. Amari is certain the answer to finding out what happened to him lies somewhere inside, if only she can get her head around the idea of mermaids, dwarves, yetis and magicians all being real things, something she has to instantly confront when she is given a weredragon as a roommate.

Amari must compete against some of the nation’s wealthiest kids—who’ve known about the supernatural world their whole lives and are able to easily answer questions like which two Great Beasts reside in the Atlantic Ocean and how old is Merlin? Just getting around the Bureau is a lesson alone for Amari with signs like ‘Department of Hidden Places this way, or is it?’ If that all wasn’t enough, every Bureau trainee has a talent enhanced to supernatural levels to help them do their jobs – but Amari is given an illegal ability. As if she needed something else to make her stand out.

With an evil magican threatening the whole supernatural world, and her own classmates thinking she is an enemy, Amari has never felt more alone. But if she doesn’t pass the three tryouts, she may never find out what happened to Quinton.