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I really loved the creative nature of this book. I studied marine science at Uni and I feel that Chung did a great job representing Ro’s love for Dolores both as a friend and a scientific interest. Ro’s family dynamics were moving and I loved the flashbacks to her childhood that helped paint the picture of who she is and how she came to be. I also found the touch of speculative fiction with the mission to populate Mars a great and interesting touch, especially considering I’m from Arizona and worked at Biosphere 2 which is the closest project in the real world to the one Chung described in the book. All in all a great read. I give it four stars only because I wish Ro’s character development and enlightenment was a bit more full circle and conclusive.
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talkin 'bout right book at the right time? it's this one for me 💙😭
first of all,i'd like to thank @netgalley and the publisher for approving my request to read this book.of course, my utmost gratitude to the author @ginathechung for writing this book💙
i didn't expect that this would be an impactful and relatable read for me.
The story is about Ro,a woman in her 30s who seems to have her life falling apart when her friend,a giant octopus named Dolores, was sold to a businessman by the mall aquarium she is working for. Before this, her boyfriend broke up with her to join an outerspace mission to Mars. With everything going wrong in Ro's life, her traumas in the last thirty years started coming back to her and caught up with her current dillemas.
Quarter-life crisis meets generational trauma.i think this what this book is about. for me,it is such a great coming of age story.
Ro had many traumatic experiences in the past brought about by her parents problems, them being immigrants,losing her father, and how it affected her personality growing up.she didn't realize it all until she felt the effects of it in her current life situation.
i cannot stress enough how much i relate to this book and it's main character😭 there are things that happened to me in the past that i don't talk about but think about often especially when i realize how it affected my current situation or my life in general. i just sit and wonder at times thinking of all the what ifs cause i couldn't undo those things anymore.
i reccomend this book to those who are like me, feeling stuck and unable to move..to those who feels responsible for everything..to those who always expect the worst thing to happen all the time, this book is for us. 💙
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Sea Change by Gina Chung was a compelling read, I’m impressed that this is a debut novel.
Gina Chung's character driven writing is refreshing & engaging, and what kept me reading.
I was definitely drawn in by her friendship with Dolores, a giant pacific octopus, the backdrop of a dying planet & missions to mars. There are many thought provoking layers to this story, Ro is a young woman with unresolved trauma, entering her 30s grappling with alcohol abuse, relationship breakdowns & a sense of giving up on life in general. It also explores the immigrant experience (particularly Korean immigrants) grief & loneliness. Whilst heavy at times there is an undertone of humour throughout & ultimately a feeling of hope for Ro as she navigates through the unwanted changes in her life.
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This was a very pleasant surprise. We follow Aurora 'Ro', a young Korean-American woman, who works in an aquarium where her father, who disappeared while on a scientific mission, also worked, as she tries to recover from heartbreak after her boyfriend Kae breaks up with her, having been selected to fly on the first ever mission to Mars. She spends days trying to figure out her life, watching her childhood best friend Yonhee, who works with her, getting engaged and getting promoted, while she stagnates, drinking at night, finding comfort in feeding Dolores, the female octopus her father had found and brought to the aquarium.
In a way, it is a novel where not much happens, where the character is, as in many novels I have read recently, a sad Millennial who makes poor choices. But I found it really touching and comforting, I liked reading about Ro's relationship with her Korean mother, the pressure of being a "good daughter", the difficulty of feeling stuck while everyone around seems to manage. And I liked Dolores. Having a main character working in an aquarium reminded me of the premise of "The Memory of Animals" (Claire Fuller), which is a completely different book but also features an octopus, and I found that Gina Chung was a lot more successful than Claire Fuller in creating an octopus character that you get attached to and that takes an important place in the novel.
It was really pleasantly written and poetic, and I enjoyed it very much.
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This wasn't quite what I was expecting, The more interesting part of the plot are oddly underdeveloped, from the ex-boyfriend's mission to Mars to the mysterious disappearance of the protagonist's father while on a research ship. Neither are resolved or explored in any great detail and the suggestion of sci-fi elements that they suggest never materialize. Even more surprising is the largely incidental appearances of Dolores, the Giant Pacific Octopus. From the blurb there is a sense that Dolores is a key character but she is disappointingly underutilised. All three add up to an attempt to make the novel into something new and fresh and original but once removed the reader is left with the overfamiliar tale of a young woman struggling to find her way and her place in the world. It is made up of conventional elements, the "menial" job with no career path, the dysfunctional relationships, the generational conflict, the millennial ennui. The most interesting parts were those that dealt with her parents' emigration to the US and the tensions of being a first generation Chinese-American. Unfortunately, Ro is not sufficiently engaging or original to make up for this issues in the rest of the narrative and the ending is sudden and lacklustre.
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Sea Change is a book about a woman who is stuck in a rut and friends with an octopus, but needs to try and change her life before she drifts away. Ro is in her thirties, works in an aquarium where she looks after an octopus who her now-disappeared dad discovered, and is struggling to deal with her boyfriend leaving her to go on a mission to Mars. She's drinking too much and barely makes time for her childhood best friend, but when she finds out that the octopus, Dolores, is being bought by a rich guy, it becomes clear Ro can't go on like this.
This is a book with a pretty weird premise—woman whose dad disappeared and ex-boyfriend left to go to Mars is friends with an octopus—but it tells a pretty down to earth story of someone hitting rock bottom and needing to change their life. Ro hides behind the past and the people who've left her or let her down, and the novel moves between the present and the past to explore the things that happened that have led her to this point. Though the novel doesn't have a huge amount of plot, as this kind of narrative often doesn't, and doesn't resolve any of the big plot elements that run throughout, meaning that you can end up a bit 'so what' by the end, Ro is a gripping character and the unusual backdrop of the novel that is used to tell a story of a downward spiral brings something fresh to the book.
I chose to read Sea Change because of the weird sounding premise, and it does deliver on being partly about a friendship with an octopus. It's easy to read and enjoyable, exploring a character needing to adapt to change, and though it could go deeper or have more going on, the sense of drifting through it does match up with Ro's mental state in the book.
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Sea Change by Gina Chung follows Ro as she deals with a recent breakup with a boyfriend and a falling out with her best friend. This all compounds the sense of loss she feels from her father disappearing years before and her strained relationship with her mother since then. She has to work out ways to move forward from all of this.