i too am 1 octopus best friend away from a full mental breakdown.

this book helped.

i love thoughtful books where everything is sad and then is hopeful, eventually, in a realistic way and not a happy ever after way. and this is that!

although it is, really, very sad. and there isn't THAT much octopus action.

bottom line: life is sad and sometimes hopeful and so is this!

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)3-and-a-half-stars arc authors-of-color ...more582 s8 comments Sujoya(theoverbookedbibliophile)- Lots of catching up to do! 602 1,998

*Publication Day - March 28, 2023*

“I’ve often wished that human bodies were as clever as those of octopuses. If we could divvy up the work of one heart among three, if we could have a semiautonomous brain in each of our appendages, perhaps we’d be more efficient with our time, less ly to waste it on grudges and hurts and all the things we feel we can’t say to one another.”

It has been fifteen years since Ro’s (Aurora) father, a marine biologist employed with a local aquarium disappeared, on a research trip. Her father’s love for marine life is something he shared with Ro ever since she was a child. Ro’s fascination with sea animals prompted her to take up a job in the same aquarium in the field of animal husbandry. Ro, now in her thirties and employed with the aquarium for over eight years, feels a special connection to Dolores a giant Pacific octopus that was one of her father’s finds and feels that Dolores can understand her and vice versa. Ro misses her Apa and harbors hope that one day he will return. Her relationship with her mother is strained and her best friend Yoonhee, who is also employed with the aquarium is busy planning her wedding and seems to be distancing herself from Ro. Ro, heartbroken after her recent breakup with her boyfriend Tae who was selected for a mission to Mars, is struggling with her loneliness, memories of her father and tension-filled exchanges with her mother. As the narrative moves back and forth between the past and present we get to more about Ro’s Korean immigrant parents, and their troubled marriage which has impacted how she perceives commitment and relationships. Adding to Ro’s unhappiness is the fact that the aquarium, hard-pressed for funds, is negotiating the sale of Dolores to a private buyer who wants to add Dolores to his private collection. The narrative follows RO as she navigates through all these changes occurring in her life, deals with past trauma and disappointments and rethinks her priorities, finding a way to accept all that has happened and make plans for her future.

Sea Change by Gina Chung is a moving story that touches upon themes of family dynamics, loss and grief, love and friendship and self-acceptance. Ro is flawed and in that she is real and relatable. Her struggles mostly stem from her past trauma and her inability to be kind to herself, which holds her back from investing in her personal relationships and prompts her to drown her sorrows in alcohol. I was particularly moved by how the author addresses the complicated relationship between Ro and her Umma and the factors that contributed to their strained relationship. I loved the descriptions of the animals in the aquarium and the information on sea animals and cephalopods in particular. The author draws our attention to the state of animals in captivity and how kindness and compassion are imperative in not only nurturing human relationships but also our relationships with all living creatures and the environment in general. The author also touches upon how the increase in environmental pollution and climate change is adversely impacting the living conditions of marine animals. I would have enjoyed more scenes with Dolores and maybe I was expecting more of those interactions. But ultimately this story is about Ro. The author balances the melancholic and depressing tone of the novel with splashes of humor and I’m glad that the story ends on a hopeful note. This is an impressive debut novel and I’ll be looking forward to reading more from the author in the future.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, for the digital review copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own. netgalley-arc145 s Mai312 404

Some of you won't this. There's just something so inherently similar about the immigrant experience and generational trauma that I relate to so well with various Asian American stories.

Ro and her boyfriend Tae have broken up. He is preparing for a mission on Mars. She is stuck in a rut working at the aquarium that houses Dolores, the octopus her father once found. Dolores is the only thing that brings her joy. As an aside, her father is also missing. Her mother seems to have moved on.

Ro has a bit of a drinking problem. Her apartment is sloppy. She has let go of most ties to family and friends. She is in a bit of a rut. Does she seem unable? Yes. Do I also empathize with her situation greatly? Also yes.143 s Thomas1,606 9,922

Omg… for all my fellow sensitive souls with abandonment issues… this one is for us!

Ok, a plot summary before I fanboy/girl further: Ro is stuck. She’s a Korean American woman entering her thirties, spending her days in an unfulfilling job at a mall aquarium and drinking herself to sleep at night. People have left her, her father who went missing on an expedition several years ago and her boyfriend who recently joined a mission to Mars. Ro struggles with the people who haven’t left, too, her mother, who she doesn’t speak to, and her best friend Yoonhee, whose upcoming marriage has eclipsed their friendship. Ro feels a connection with Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus who’s also Ro’s last link to her father. But when Dolores is sold to a wealthy investor who plans to take her away, Ro is faced with the choice to stay submerged in her unaddressed grief and trauma or to reclaim the parts of her life worth living.

Anyone who’s followed me for any period of time knows that I love a well-developed angsty character arc, and Sea Change blew that out of the park. There’s a lot going on in Ro’s life, including the upcoming sale of Dolores, Ro’s melancholy distant relationship with her mother, her conflict with Yoonhee, and more. Gina Chung does an excellent job of keeping the ball rolling with all of these elements of Ro’s life in the present while also portraying how Ro’s grief about her father’s disappearance and her breakup with Tae have gutted her emotionally. Chung’s use of flashbacks was excellent; her scenes set in the past felt vivid and provided important, heartrending context for Ro’s present circumstances. I’d describe Chung’s writing style as understated yet effective, as I cared deeply for Ro and felt for her across all her relationships.

With that said, I want to highlight that Ro as a character won me over. Un her best friend Yoonhee, Ro isn’t flashy. She’s just trying to live her life, and I loved that for her and about her. I felt compelled by her messiness and compassion for her struggle, her calling Tae in a bout of missing him and her submerging her grief in alcohol. Ro’s growth throughout the novel moved me so much, and her realizations about grief, connection, and attachment had me teary-eyed at least a couple of times toward the end. As someone who’s faced multiple instances of deep grief in my life, I felt so connected to Ro and her journey of recognizing that grief isn’t something you can avoid nor is it something you ever fully get over even when you do address it. Grief can feel better with time though it often has to feel worse, first.

I also enjoyed the Asian American (specifically Korean American) representation in Sea Change. The representation didn’t feel overly in my face, rather, it’s these three-dimensional Korean American characters living their day-to-day nuanced lives, and I loved that. I d and resonated with the complexity in which Chung portrayed Ro’s parents’ immigration experience and how that went on to affect Ro’s own psyche. Ro’s parents felt full people and not stereotypical Asian American parents, thank goodness. Also not to be thirsty in a Goodreads review but where can I get a gay or bi version of Tae lolol anyway I’m wholesome.

Overall, highly recommended. In my top two favorite books I’ve read this year so far. Gina Chung is an author to watch and I am highly anticipating her short story collection coming out next year. Also, for those who’ve already read Sea Change, the scene where Dolores splashes the white man who’s trying to buy her and Ro starts laughing was SO funny I literally giggled while reading this book at 10:30pm in my bed made me laugh, I appreciate Chung for including it.2nd-favorites adult-fiction five-stars ...more94 s Dorie - Cats&Books :) On hiatus until April1,064 3,332

This is going to be a DNF for me at about 40%. I was hoping that this would be mostly about the octopus and how climate change affected sea creatures.

Well up to 40% this is a really slow starter and really centers around Ro. This felt an adult coming of age as Ro goes over and over her story and how is she going to cope with her boyfriend going to Mars!!

OK I admit I was hoping this would be at least a bit Remarkably Bright Creatures -- it's not. The octopus story seemed just an added part of the story and I couldn't relate to Ro at all.

I'm struggling to relate to how this is a 2023 highly anticipated book!!

2023-netgalley-challenge animal-themed-fiction contemporary-fiction85 s1 comment luce (cry baby)1,494 4,508

? blog ? thestorygraph ? letterboxd ? tumblr ? ko-fi ?

this was so close to being something more

“Love was paring myself down, again and again, until I was as smooth as a block of new marble, ready to become whatever the next one needed me to.”

Sea Change is yet another addition to what I d to call the She’s Not Feeling Too Good subgenre. These books focus on women in their 20s, sometimes their 30s, who are unable or unwilling to reconcile themselves to life; so they drift, unmoored from others, alienated from social conventions and expectations, their passivity occasionally giving way to something nastier, more misanthropic, yet they remain mired by ennui, burdened by a sense of otherness. If they have a boyfriend he is either too kind, too well-adjusted, or he is the opposite, a right wanker. Their solipsistic nature and self-sabotaging tendencies make them into bad friends, yet, they are desperately lonely and often long to be someone else, someone happy, someone capable of traversing the murky waters of adulthood other people seem to do. While you could easily argue that once you read a few of these books, you’ve read them all, they do often implement an element or revolve around a specific event that differentiates them from one another. In the quintessential she's-not-feeling-too-good book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the main character plans on sleeping for an entire year. In Woman, Eating the protagonist is a vampire. In Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead the narrator is death-obsessed. You get the gist.

“Other people’s joys have always seemed more solid to me than my own. I’ve never trusted happiness, have trouble with the very notion of it.”

What makes or breaks these books is the protagonist. I find characters who are flawed to be compelling, even when they are as nasty as the unnamed narrator in MYORAR or self-destructive the leads in Luster and in You Exist Too Much. Sure, not all of the main characters populating this subgenre have that dark, mordant, sense of humor that makes their social commentary and internal monologue so wickedly funny and on point. Some, Writers & Lovers by Lily King, Win Me Something by Kyle Lucia Wu, and Tell Me I'm an Artist by Chelsea Martin, present us with narratives that are more grounded in reality, and characterized by a sad, occasionally wistful tone. And to some extent, Sea Change offers something to that effect as it is quietly reflective work. However, it ultimately felt flat, insubstantial, and monotonous, in a way that the books I just mentioned by King, Wu, and Martin didn't.

“No one is going to fix you for you, I thought to myself when I got home, giving myself a good hard stare in my bathroom mirror. But all revelations, it didn’t last long.”

Ro is in her early thirties and has been working the same ‘menial’ job at the same mall aquarium her father, a marine biologist, used to take her to visit. There, he introduced Ro to Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus. After her father is declared missing during an expedition, Ro latches onto Dolores, seeing her remaining link to her father. Over the years, Ro’s unwillingness to change, to break away from her lonely routine, pushes away her boyfriend, Tae, who leaves her to train for a mission to Mars, and Yoonhee, once her best friend. Estranged from her mother, Ro often spends her nights drinking herself into being numb, removed from heartbreak and grief. After Ro learns that the aquarium is planning on selling Doloros to a rich investor, who will move her to his private aquarium, she slips further into depression and grows resentful of her mother and Yoonhee. She longs for her father, often imagining what-if scenarios, where they are eventually reunited.

“In the end, I know, no amount of wishful thinking can ever bring him back, and nothing we say or do or promise to one another can inoculate us against loss or leaving. But in the meantime, there is still so much of this world to see and hold on to, to care for and care about, to love in spite of— or because of— the fact that none of us are here for very long.”

most she's-not-feeling-too-good books, Sea Change is definitely not plot-oriented. The story instead sets out to immerse us in Ro’s life. Similarly to Win Me Something and You Exist Too Much, there are chapters giving us insight into her childhood and her adolescence, where we gain not only an understanding of the dynamic between Ro and her parents, but we see how her idealization of her father often saw her dismissing her mother’s feelings. We also how Ro’s friendship with Yoonhee has never been easy, or smooth, as her friend seems to find Ro’s more introverted nature a ‘downer’. And, of course, we also get to see the making and unmaking of Ro’s relationship with her ex. Facts about animals, be it penguins or octopuses, are interjected through the narrative, and there is even this water-motif that succeeds in making certain scenes or thoughts more evocative.

“Some days, wandering through the aquarium’s blue halls, I start feeling maybe I don’t exist, my body is just this translucent membrane for water and light to rush through, day in and day out, just all the other creatures here.”

But the more I read the more I found the whole past/present chapter structure predictable and so Ro’s ‘journey’. I kept waiting to feel something more, to be surprised even. But Ro’s story unfolds in a very conventional way. The people around her never come into focus, so those moments of fracture and/or of reconciliation felt underminingly flat. Sure, the author succeeds in articulating the worries and uncertainties many people feel when they feel that their adult life is not going how it should, or when they feel un other people, they will never be able to ‘fucntion’, to be ‘normal’. But much about Ro and her story felt ‘safe’, I wanted more opaqueness, more ambiguity, just more, especially from Ro herself. Her strained, eventually tentative, bond with her mother was a much more compelling dynamic than her relationships with Yoonhee and ex. We see how Ro's loyalty to her father, pushed away her mother, and we see how things generational and cultural differences as well as a language barrier can be both a source of tension between mother and daughter but eventually allow them to recognise the ways they have both failed to really see each other. I wanted more of that, less drama about her friend getting married and Ro not being supportive. Or the whole ex going to Mars thing. That whole thing was just a gimmick.

Then again, I recognise that having read my way through many of these books and having even spent months of my life writing a dissertation on a selected few of them, I may have simply been overexposed to this type of story. The focus on the aquarium, on animals, on Dolores, which should have made Sea Change stand out against a lot of similar ‘alienated-disaster-woman’ type of books, actually brought to mind Mindy Mejia's The Dragon Keeper, which I read a couple of years back. So, maybe if you haven’t read that one or if you have simply read only a couple of books with this type of ‘vibe’, maybe then you'll find Sea Change to be a less conventional read than I was.

“If every hurtful or careless thing we ever said to one another manifested itself visually in the body. Would we be any different than how we are now? Would we do more to protect each other, ourselves?”5-so-so-reads disappointing-reads netgalley-edelweiss ...more60 s Amy Biggart486 580

This book REALLY worked for me

I'll be a little bold with this review and say that there were personal reasons why this story worked really well for me. And, since my ex-boyfriend isn't on a one-way space trip to Mars and my dad isn't lost at sea and presumed dead, you may be able to guess why this worked for me.

I really love in-depth character studies about grief, and this is exactly that. Most of this book really revolves around two (maybe three) central conflicts within Ro's life. First, her father's disappearance and her inability to communicate about this loss with her mother. Second, her ex-boyfriend suddenly signing up for Earth's first trip to colonize Mars and breaking up with her. And, I guess to a much smaller degree, her aquarium's octopus being sold to a private buyer.

That's the right order, in terms of how much space each of those conflicts take up in this book. This book is kind of sparse, and I'm partial to the sad-woman-moving genre that this book fits into. There aren't enough stories about thirty-something people struggling in dead-end careers, losing relationships, and behaving erratically. This is that. You also see a very vivid picture, via flashbacks, of Ro's childhood spent tiptoeing around her parents' feelings and trying to prevent their fighting. You also see some of her parents' experience as first-generation immigrants.

I could talk for hours about what I loved about this. It's Pizza Girl + Sorrow and Bliss + If I Had Your Face, and I loved it a lot. 46 s Karine175 63

Ro is stuck in a quarterlife crisis. Although her father disappeared years ago, she is still grieving his loss as she has never been able to accept his absence. Her life is held together by very fine thread only and it doesn't take much to make it all fall apart. The only thing that brings her some kind of joy is caring for Dolores, the last specimen of the Pacific Octopus on earth. If you are a diver me, you'll know that there a many Pacific Octopuses left, but the story takes place in a not so far away future, where our planet has taken some more backlash and species have disappeared. And I give absolute kudos to the author to manage to make an octopus a believable character !

The main themes in the book are obviously grief and its consequences, and displacement in all its forms. It's about Ro's parents who left Korea for the US to carve out a better life, without really knowing what that means. It's Dolores who has been fished out of the poisonous Bering Vortex and put in an aquarium tank. It's Tae - Ro's boyfriend - who will leave Earth and try to colonize Mars. These themes have been written in an easy but beautiful prose and it made me understand and sympathize with Ro instantly.

This book has left a little dent in my heart and Ro and Dolores are characters that will linger for a long time. The next time I'll meet eye to eye with an octopus in the wild, I'm sure I'll think back to both of them.

A heartfelt thank you to NetGalley, the publisher Vintage and the author for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.2023 netgalley-202335 s1 comment Sunny750 4,505

Asian American women’s lit yas!29 s theliterateleprechaun 1,603 27

This is “a thing” now, right? Cephalopod friendships. It’s the second one in a few months. I had total FOMO after missing the opportunity to read the other popular octopus book, so I wasn’t taking a chance passing up on this one.

An impressive debut by a Korean American author, Sea Change will grip you and won’t let go. It’s fresh and unique and quirky. It’s edgy, too, with some swearing and some ‘right in your face uncomfortable’ prose to see if you’ll blink. So Millennial.

You’ll meet Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus, who happens to be Ro’s best friend and her last link to her father, a marine biologist who disappeared on an expedition. Ro is going through a tough spot right now and, thankfully, Dolores is there to ‘lean on.’

Author Gina Chung discusses difficult family relationships, love, loss, abandonment, and climate change. She explores the need to confront and then come to terms with childhood trauma in addition to the importance of fully committing and being present in our relationships with others.

I love the focus on seeing anomalies, such as Dolores, as beautiful. We’re all beautiful anomalies. Let’s embrace it.

I’m glad I took a chance on this fabulous book about a giant Pacific octopus and a girl who struggles to find her place in an ever-changing world.

Plus, now I can say I’ve read a book about Enteroctopus Dofleini …

I was gifted this advance copy by Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage and Anchor, and NetGalley and was under no obligation to provide a review.
2022-reads netgalley26 s lily543 2,321 Read

when your first book of the year is a winner
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