Sea Change

Can I just say I am here for messy Korean-American female protagonists. In Sea Change, Ro is going through it in this slightly skewed near future world. At 30 she's still mourning the loss of her father — who disappeared 15 years ago researching the Bering Vortex, the most polluted region of the world's ever warming ocean. Her boyfriend has left her — to join a privately funded mission to colonize Mars. And her best friend is moving on with her life, getting married and selling the one consoling constant in Ro's life — a giant mutant octopus that lives in a mall aquarium. When the kids say “it's complicated”, they're not kidding.

Ro is decidedly not dealing with any of it — instead she's hitting bars and driving home drunk, or holing up at home downing gin and Mountain Dew and obsessing over how everyone in her life leaves. She is flailing and failing and generally making a mess of things as she leaves her 20's behind. It's that struggle to keep moving forward despite the losses, to hope for more, and to invite a little grace into her life that I loved. I'll raise a sharktini to that any day.