A marine biologist returns to her childhood home on the Oregon coast after a family crisis, only to find the tidal pools — and the people she left behind — have both changed in ways she didn’t expect.
Dr. Mara Voss left her Oregon coast hometown at eighteen and didn’t look back — until her mother’s early-onset dementia forces her home to manage the transition. What she finds is a coastal community quietly transformed: longtime fishing families displaced by short-term rentals, the marine research station she loved as a child under threat of closure, and a tidal zone she documented obsessively as a teenager showing signs of change no one wants to name.
This is a quiet novel about scientific observation and willful blindness — about what we document and what we choose not to see, and about a woman who has spent her career studying ecosystems she can’t save coming home to a person she can still choose to help.
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T. Harrington — Pacific Northwest–based marine biologist writing her first novel. “I write about scientists in fiction because I’ve never found them accurately portrayed anywhere else. This is my attempt to do it right.”
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