"Sea Change" by Gina Chung is a poetic exploration of love and loss. Through evocative language and poignant storytelling, Chung crafts a captivating narrative that resonates with emotional depth and grace.

Found this book really enjoyable. Slower read for me than usual. I loved our Ro our protagonist and the look at her life as a single 30 something. I found myself relating in alot of ways. Her struggles with grief and her approach (or not) to moving on really stuck with me.

I really enjoyed the writing style of this book and will pick up a Gina Chung book again.

“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.”

Another Sad GIrl Novel coming at you!!! This time we're hanging out with Ro, who drinks a lot, thinks a lot, and is deeply lonely. Her boyfriend has left her for a mission to Mars (!), her mum is by turns difficult and absent, her friends are tiring of her shit. Ro's one solace is the octopus in the aquarium in which she works, Dolores. But Dolores is about to be sold off to a tech bro, and so, Ro starts spiralling.

This is just scratching the surface of this frankly overstuffed novel - we've also got a dystopian climate change situation, a missing father, mysterious phone calls and plenty of complex relationships. Sea Change is accomplished in many ways but it's far too busy and as a result, nothing works.

Now, I LOVE a sad girl novel and have a huge amount of bandwidth for these stories. Flawed women, gross women, even evil women - hook them to my veins. But unfrotunately I found Ro to be flat and sort of annoying. She monologues a lot about the nature of love, of happiness, and of lonlieness that just felt like the author wanted to get her oh-so-clever thoughts onto the page.

The result is monotonous and a slog to get through. I desperately wanted to be surprised by this novel - I mean, there's a mission to Mars, and a giant, vaguely magical Octopus, but these felt tacked onto to a very pedestrian novel. Ro's story is conventional, and feels like it's been done before, over and over, in more stylish or interesting ways - Jade Song's Chlorine and Claire Kohda's Woman, Eating spring to mind. I just never got invested in Ro and when the whole novel hangs off the reader connecting with her, that was a fatal flaw.

I don't understand why Chung had such fascinating ideas - the Bering vortex is a place so poisoned by pollution that the animals there are mutating, and this isn't given much beyond a reason for Ro's missing dad. Similarly, Ro's job at the aquarium, her interactions with animals and her relationship with Dolores should have made Sea Change stand out against a lot of similar reads, but these elements simply weren't developed enough - again, because I think the author was trying to do too much.

A big disappointment for me sadly!!!

Ro's in her thirties. She's feeling lost as she's estranged from her mother, her boyfriend has just left for a mission to Mars and her only companion, an octopus called Dolores who is her last link to her father who disappeared, is being sold to a wealthy investor. Ro starts to wade through her childhood trauma, recommit to those around her and find where she belongs.

I read this book slowly for the past few weeks and I am obsessed with it. So many passages of this book hit so deep to me and I felt like I could relate so much to Ro, with her journey of finding herself and navigating through loss and grief as well as trying to move forward. I truly think that this book found me at the perfect time - it is one that I think I will think about long after I finished. The writing is so beautiful and I love how everything flowed together, even the jumps to previous years which normally I’m not a fan of but I really like how they were done here. I loved getting to know the characters especially Ro who was my favourite and getting to see her flaws and how she developed through the book. I loved how realistic Ro’s hopelessness and depression felt and how she eventually finds hope but not in a happily ever after way, in a way where she’s just trying to take it day by day, figuring out what is next for her in this journey. I found it so interesting to learn more about marine biology, especially about the adorable octopus Dolores who was also one of my favourite characters.

⚠️ CWs: disappearance, cursing, racism, alcohol use, derogatory language, drunk driving, person with alcohol use disorder, drug use, grief, blood, miscarriage; mentions sex, dead animals, depression, vomiting, cheating ⚠️

Thank you to Pan Macmillan, Picador and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book!

Thank you NetGalley, the publisher and the author for the ARC of this title in exchange for an honest review.

First of all, gorgeous cover: no notes.
Second, if you are getting this book in the hopes that it focuses more on the octopus, I think you will be disappointed. If you're looking for a book that is raw and covers various life topics from loss, grief, breakups, immigration and trying to find yourself in a world full of chaos then you will enjoy this novel. Dolores the octopus being a feature is just an added bonus!

I really related to Ro with just how lost in life she seemed to be and trying to find some sort of independence for herself.

Will definitely check out more from this author!

The narrative was well written but I sadly didn’t like the main character which made it difficult to get on board with everything they were going through! Lots going on and lots of subjects tackled quite well!

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 liked 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 like 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 like 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, like 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 like 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.”


Like 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 like maybe I don’t exist, like my body is just this translucent membrane for water and light to rush through, day in and day out, just like 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 unlike 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 like 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?”

Thought the concept of this sounded very intriguing, and there seems to have been a bit of a surge for these narratives at the moment but the writing style just wasn’t engaging for me really at all, unfortunately.

An original and funny debut novel.
“I wanted, if I was being honest, to slow down, just a little while. Everything felt like a race for which there wasn’t even a definitive prize and that didn’t seem to end until you died”
Ro is struggling through life, a Korean American woman, recently dumped by her boyfriend, estranged from her mother and on the verge of losing her job at the local aquarium.
Her only friend is Delores, the large octopus at the aquarium.
Loved the premise of the book and the unusual friendship, felt so real and normal.
You really feel for Ro, she feels slightly abandoned and having issues letting go, especially the loved ones in her life
You feel you’ve become friends with Ro by the end of the book.
Thanks @ginathechung @picadorbooks & @netgalley for the eARC

I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked up this novel, but what I received was a very emotional story about connection (and lack thereof) and how it feels to be someone who has lost their sense of direction in life and doesn't have the willpower to find it again.

This is set in a somewhat dystopian future where Earth is so polluted and ruined it's steadily becoming uninhabitable to the point that plans are now underway to inhabit Mars. We follow Ro, a young woman who works in an aquarium and has a strong relationship with a giant Pacific octopus, Dolores. Ro has it tough - her boyfriend is one of the hopefuls heading up to Mars and her father disappeared into the ocean years ago and never returned. This is a story told in a mix of flashbacks through her life alongside glimpses of how she is coping in the present.

This book doesn't have a lot of plot and the main focus of this story is about how Ro deals with her emotions and experiences. This is a coming-of-age story so don't let the premise fool you to think otherwise! Although space travel and giant ocean creatures feature in this book there isn't much focus on those aspects and this is purely a book about what it means to be human.

This was a well written and lovely book. Literary fiction isn't my favourite but I have no regrets after reading this one and it turned out to be an emotional and interesting experience.

Big thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Emotionally charged literary fiction

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher, Pan Macmillan for a digital ARC of this book. I have chosen to write this honest review voluntarily.

I was drawn to this book by both the octopus and the tagline: “Ro is stuck. She’s just entered her thirties, she’s estranged from her mother, and her boyfriend has just left her to join a mission to Mars.”. But this is literary fiction, (which I hadn’t appreciated when I started reading it) and the octopus and Mars don’t really feature beyond being devices that set up the story.

In fact there is not much of a story here, Sea Change is a set of remembrances by our protagonist Ro. Whilst experiencing challenges in her present, Ro revisits memories of her distant and recent past, focussing on family and close relationships.

As a general rule I dislike literary fiction, considering it to be pretentious nonsense. Whilst the lack of plot, conflict and resolution is not something that typically appeals, I found Sea Change to be pleasantly surprising. For me, Ro’s (dysfunctional) family dynamics were very relatable and I found some passages very moving, to the point where I may even have cried a little. I wouldn’t read it again, but this was different, interesting and well written.

I really enjoyed this book! I thought the world in which the main story about Ro is told was super interesting and added an extra dimension to this literary fiction novel to set it apart from other lit-fics attempting to discuss similar themes. The main character, Ro, is going to be very relatable to a lot of people who read this novel and I think that will endear her to them.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC in exchange for a review!

Sea Change was a beautifully melancholy reflection on complex family relationships, muddling through your late 20s and dealing with heartbreak - with a giant octopus thrown in for good measure.

I think this book is set in a near future, given Ro’s boyfriend has left her for an experimental trip to Mars and her father went missing on a research trip to a part of the ocean made dangerously strange by climate change, but otherwise it’s rooted in our reality. Gina Chung does an amazing job of bringing complicated relationships to life, and I loved how the main focus wasn’t actually on romantic relationships. I’d say the majority of the time is spent reflecting on Ro’s relationship with her parents, both before and after her father’s disappearance, and the one with her childhood best friend who is getting married.

Ro does have a massive self-destructive streak, so if you have little patience for that then consider this your warning. But if you love a messy character then you’ll love Ro. I liked the back and forth narrative, as we get to see Ro growing up, the tumultuous relationship with her parents evolve, and I think it helps understand why she is the way she is at 30. Chung addresses all the messy family stuff like resentment, infidelity, unmet expectations. The focus is mainly on Ro, but we also get a glimpse into her mother’s disappointment at life in America as Korean immigrants.

I had a deep fascination with marine biology as a kid, so I loved the Dolores side plot even though octopuses do scare the shit out of me. But Dolores was amazing and I loved how Chung managed to write a moving human-animal friendship without sacrificing Dolores’ wildness.

I’d definitely recommend this one if you like messy, reflective books with not much plot but a lot of complex relationships!

This book was ok. I enjoyed the main character’s journey throughout this book, as well as the recurring motif of the octopus and marine life, however I felt like there could have been a bit more plot. Most of the book just felt like someone’s thoughts written out, which meant at times it was a bit of a drag to get through. Additionally I felt that the changes Ro went through at the end of the book kind of came out of nowhere/weren’t really built up.

It is interesting how literature now seeks to reach young adults who do not have a certain direction. Why does everyone think we should have it right? We are between 20 and 30 years old, we don't know what we are going to want to do for the rest of our lives, many things have happened to us throughout the years we have been alive, with a changing society all the time, a pandemic... and even with all that, many times we are asked to be super clear about everything.

Sea Change transports us to that dystopian world where it seems that everything remains the same. Although we are exploring other planets to be able to go to populate them (for what? to destroy it like this one?), and we meet Ro who has an octopus named Dolores as the central pillar of her life, which her father found missing.

This book is quite reflective and what I liked the most is that we not only got to know Ro's life but also the people around her, and they are not simple stories, some of them are quite crude and convey situations of violence or abuse that they are naturalized. Will that still happen in the future? I hope not.

Without a doubt an interesting, reflective, dystopically interesting story.

Thanks Pan Macmillan for the ARC I read on NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed the premise of this book and the child/parent trauma was compelling. Dolores was a well fleshed out being that I had real empathy for. However, I didn't feel propelled to pick it up often so for me it's a solid 3.75 stars.

I really wanted this to be more about the octopus, instead it’s a thoughtful insight into the life of a thirty something whose (ex)boyfriend has signed up to be part of a mission to colonise Mars and she’s struggling to cope without him. She’s in denial about the disappearance of her father and avoids her mother, she’s very much stuck in rut and is slowly self destructing.
Overall an emotional coming of age that was well written and I think it will be well received by those who aren’t expecting something different. Space travel and an octopus had me in a completely different headspace.

"How embarrassing it is, to be so undone by such small things."

Sea Change is the coming-of-age story of Ro, an uninspired woman in her early 30s as she tries to navigate an ocean of heartbreak and grief. Ro's only meaningful companion is Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus in the aquarium Ro works. Dolores is Ro's main link with her father, a marine biologist who disappeared on a return expedition to the area of the ocean where they once caught Dolores.

To say Ro is stuck is an understatement: her boyfriend just left her to join a groundbreaking mission to Mars, her relationship with her mother is rocky and her best friend Yoonhee has grown tired of Ro letting her down. The turning point for Ro is when she finds out that in order to prevent financial insecurity, the aquarium have plans to sell Dolores to a filthy-rich businessman with an interest in marine life. Sea Change is a stunning exploration on what it means to be human.

Sea Change is so so compelling, and beautifully written. It is also weird in all the best ways (who wouldn't want an octopus for a best friend?) I cannot believe that this is Gina Chung's debut and I am so excited to see what she does next. Thanks to Net Galley and Picador for the advance copy of this!

this was a weird book. the writing was disengaging at times, but overall an ok read.

— thanks to the publisher and netgalley for the free digital ARC.

I’m so sad. I’m also so hopeful. It somehow managed to balance both perfectly, it was such a painful book in many ways and yet it made me think “hope is not lost, you will be okay”. It’s so hard to write reviews for books like this but it was really lovely, a book I needed to read, and like a hug for my heart.