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From the award-winning author of A Heart in a Body in The World comes a gorgeous and fiercely feminist young adult novel. When a teen travels to Hawaii to track down her sperm donor father, she discovers the truth about him, about the sunken shipwreck that’s become his obsession, and most of all about herself.
Harper Proulx has lived her whole life with unanswered questions about her anonymous sperm donor father. She's convinced that without knowing him, she can't know herself. When a chance Instagram post connects Harper to a half sibling, that connection yields many more and ultimately leads Harper to uncover her father's identity.
So, fresh from a painful breakup and still reeling with anxiety that reached a lifetime high during the pandemic, Harper joins her newfound half siblings on a voyage to Hawaii to face their father. The events of that summer, and the man they discover—a charismatic deep-sea diver obsessed with solving the mystery of a fragile sunken shipwreck—will force Harper to face some even bigger questions: Who is she? Is she her DNA, her experiences, her successes, her failures? Is she the things she loves—or the things she hates? Who she is in dark times? Who she might become after them?
Harper Proulx has lived her whole life with unanswered questions about her anonymous sperm donor father. She's convinced that without knowing him, she can't know herself. When a chance Instagram post connects Harper to a half sibling, that connection yields many more and ultimately leads Harper to uncover her father's identity.
So, fresh from a painful breakup and still reeling with anxiety that reached a lifetime high during the pandemic, Harper joins her newfound half siblings on a voyage to Hawaii to face their father. The events of that summer, and the man they discover—a charismatic deep-sea diver obsessed with solving the mystery of a fragile sunken shipwreck—will force Harper to face some even bigger questions: Who is she? Is she her DNA, her experiences, her successes, her failures? Is she the things she loves—or the things she hates? Who she is in dark times? Who she might become after them?
33 Reviews
3.5

Nat
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Jennifer B
Created 6 months agoShare
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“I loved this book so much! It shines a light on phone and social media addiction in a way that is extremely relatable, even for adults. Set during the pandemic in 2021 it also highlights parental hypervigilance and control. But the heart of the story is about what it means to be a family.
Harper is a teen influencer who has 10,000 followers. She is oblivious to the fact that she does things like hiking only to get a great shot to post, but her boyfriend and friends aren't and it causes a lot of tension in her relationships. Her phone is her savior, a world in her palm that she can visit and "look inside restaurants she'll never go to, or view trailers of films she'll never see, or watch gamers playing a game she doesn't play, or a guy freaking out at a haunted house she'll never visit." She likens the allure of the internet to a 7-Eleven, open twenty-four hours. She spends every moment she's not engaged in her life scrolling on her phone, and the author does a great job of showing this to us:
"And then she scrolls. A girl applying fake eyelashes, the Taj Mahal, a tortoise with an inspirational slogan underneath. The variant, the numbers tick-ticking up, and another variant on the horizon. 'Ten Ways Your Diet Is Sabotaging Your Health.' 'The Alarming Side Effects of Not Eating Enough Greens.'"
Harper is an only child living a life dictated by her controlling, hovering, single mother, who only wants the best for her but wants Harper to do it her way and on her terms. Her mom wants Harper to be perfect and won't accept anything less. When Harper gets a 98% on a test her mom doesn't congratulate her; instead she asks what answers she got wrong and why.
Harper's father has always been an unknown sperm donor (her mother won't discuss him or give Harper any details about his profile), until one of her followers comments that Harper looks just like her friend. Being the social media whiz she is she finds the friend and is amazed when she realizes that they look like twins. They are not twins but they do have the same sperm donor father.
And so we go down a DNA rabbit hole where Harper not only finds more half-siblings but meets them. When they go on a trip to find and meet their bio dad (a trip Harper's mom forbids her to go on but Harper goes anyway), Harper begins to question everything - about her relationship to her phone, to her mom, and to the world.
One of the most profound sections of the book is when Harper's phone gets knocked into the ocean. At first she has a really hard time - she doesn't know what to do with herself during the down moments she would normally be scrolling. But soon she learns that living in the moment and savoring life is much better than scrolling on her phone. She likens scrolling to a tsunami of noise: "This noise is its own tsunami, its own disease, its own catastrophe. Living in fear is. Fear is a shutting out; love is a letting in. Fear is a shutting out; wonder is a letting in. Fear is a shutting out; living is a letting in."
This is a coming of age journey that was totally unputdownable.”

InquiringLibrarian
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Sadie
Created 9 months agoShare
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Lisa Gray
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About Deb Caletti
Deb Caletti is the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of over twenty books for adults and young adults, including Honey, Baby, Sweetheart, a finalist for the National Book Award; A Heart in a Body in the World, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book; Girl, Unframed; and One Great Lie. Her books have also won the Josette Frank Award for Fiction, the Washington State Book Award, and numerous other state awards and honors, and she was a finalist for the PEN USA Award. She lives with her family in Seattle.
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