Pebble & Dove

In the tradition of Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, a once-famous but now-abandoned aquarium-in-a-ship in Florida is the captivating backdrop for a novel of family secrets and dysfunction, and the ways in which it can sometimes take an animal to remind us how to be human. Lauren’s life is falling apart. She has a storage unit full of candles she can’t sell, a growing mountain of debt, and a teenage daughter, Dove, who is growing more and more withdrawn. Then her husband sends her a shocking text: Lauren, I wnt a divorce. Desperate to escape her life, Lauren drives herself and Dove down to her late mother’s dilapidated trailer in Florida. While keeping the eccentric citizens of Swaying Palms at bay, Lauren begins to untangle the truth about her estranged mother. How did world-famous portrait photographer Imogen Starr—who left Lauren to be raised by her aunt while Imogen pursued her illustrious career—end up at Swaying Palms? And what happened to her fortune and her photographs? Meanwhile, Dove has secrets of her own. The discovery of a mysterious photograph at her grandmother’s trailer leads her to the abandoned Flamingo Key Aquarium and Tackle, where Dove meets Pebble, the world’s oldest captive manatee, and the caretaker who has dedicated his life to training her, in part to escape from his own difficult marriage. It is Pebble, a former star attraction now long-forgotten, who will ultimately hold the key to helping mother and daughter come to terms with Imogen’s unexpected legacy, and break free of their own loneliness and isolation. Pebble and Dove is the story of a family brought back together by an unlikely champion—in this case, a 1,000-pound aquatic mammal. Sharply observed, darkly funny, and moving, it is a novel about the fraught relationship between mothers and daughters, and learning how to choose between what is worth saving and what needs to be let go.