Here Beside the Rising Tide

Jane (On Earth as It Is on Television) bends genres with wild abandon in this gonzo outing about a woman on the edge—and the sea creatures who pull her back. As a child, Jenni happily whiled away summer hours on Pearl Island’s beaches. One such summer, she became best friends with a new boy in town, Timmy, only to later watch him disappear into the ocean. Thirty years, two kids, a failed marriage, and a commercially successful romance series later, Jenni returns to Pearl Island to clean out her mother’s house. Between copious amounts of wine, she desperately tries to earn points with her school-age children, dodge her editor’s demands, and stay ahead of her self-actualizing soon-to-be-ex. Then a 10-year-old boy shows up at her doorstep claiming to be Timmy. Jenni’s sugar- and booze-fueled journey to find herself becomes even more complicated by a potential romantic entanglement with a local surfer and the tentacled sea monster that, Timmy warns, threatens Earth. The author’s “kitchen sink” approach throws together women’s fiction staples with cheesy action movie–style thrills. While she does an exceptional job lampooning the “dozens of books in a series” style of franchising, her approach doesn’t allow for character growth or appreciable change. The result is the literary equivalent of a popcorn flick: fun but forgettable. Agent: Holly Root, Root Literary. (Jan.)