Plucked from the staff recommendation shelves at East Bay Booksellers somewhat randomly. I devoured this slim, grim novel in two days. I can’t get the narrator or the boy she was caring for out of my head. My heart is all cracked and bruised from it. Set not in our pandemic but in an imagined one, where a red algae, swept off the ocean when the wind picks up, is gruesomely deadly and most everyone has moved away from the coast. So much is packed into these 200 pages. Memory, mothers & daughters, lovers, indecision, nostalgia, holding on, letting go, hunger, ferocity/tenderness. No stock characters (looking at you, Ocean, sorry to say!), no wasted words. Translated from Spanish.