Chung is a very talented young writer and Sea Change is an impressive debut.
Aurora (Ro) is a troubled young woman drifting through life with abandonment issues and a difficult relationship with her Korean born mother. There are many other issues being dealt with throughout this book and Chung manages to keep the reader engaged with clever and nuanced plotting, slowly revealing Ro's childhood and the impact which traumatic life events had on her journey into adulthood.
Ro's most stable relationship is with Doloros, the octopus, who seems to understand her in a way her parents and peers don't and is her remaining link to her missing father. These vivid scenes are lovely to read.
Sea Change would appeal to readers who enjoy coming-of-age stories, complicated characters and tales of growing up across two cultures.
My thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

If the cover of this book leads you to believe it's another enchanting octopus novel, you will be disappointed. And from that aspect, I was. Less octopuses more woman disaster tale.

I was drawn to this by the references to the protagonist's relationship with an octopus, and the presence of the novel on many a "most anticipated books of 2023" list. Now if I had been aware that this was more of a disaster woman story (think My Year of Rest and Relaxation and The Pisces to name a few) I would have perhaps thought twice about giving it a go... those novels are now ten a penny and a lot of them haven't really worked for me.

Given what I've said above, maybe it's best to take my review with a pinch of salt (and read some more positive ones if you're interested in the book!) but I didn't find much to enjoy here. I struggled to care about much that happened in the story and found the octopus plot to be shoehorned in (and almost as if it was forgotten about later on in the book). Not for me.

If the cover of this book leads you to believe it's another enchanting octopus novel, you will be disappointed. And from that aspect, I was. There is much less cephalopodic content than I'd hoped. That being said, the story told by protagonist Ro about her Korean-born parents, her best friend, her boyfriend, and her work at a small aquarium is a satisfying one. It is set in the most unlikely place for a scientific institution - - a New Jersey mall. Ro has a lot of baggage and this book takes us through her sorting, packing, unpacking, and dirty laundry as she attempts to make peace with the people in her life and the sadness many of them deposit in her when they leave. The giant Pacific octopus, Dolores, is along for the emotional trip though she doesn't really have much to contribute except in a metaphoric sense. The delight and wonder that is an octopus is missing from "Sea Change".

In the beginning we are told that Dolores is 18 to 25 years old (about 4 to 5 times longer than octopuses like her actually live). That fact isn't "explained"until two thirds of the pages have been turned. There are a few other scientific glitches in the text. Ro is recalling a childhood experience when her mother yells at her father about not paying the electric bill at a time when they really needed the air conditioning and yet her mother goes right into her bedroom and turns on the fan. Electricity would be needed for the fan, too. Ro's father is a marine biologist but he writes home from an expedition that they saw "a whole pod of humpback whales" but it is toothed whales that swim in pods - humpback whales do not form pods, only loose aggregations. A marine biologist who throughout the book is very specific about facts would not have been that casual about his terminology. Although I did get hung up on some of this, Ro's creation of a path to a better future held my interest. She is at once a strong character and a vulnerable one. The reader will find herself rooting hard for Ro to conquer her fears and get her life together. I did, at some point, have a strong urge to go running into her apartment to wash some dishes and vacuum! But, that's just me, I think. The most enjoyable parts of "Sea Change" remain, for me, the passages when Ro is at work, envisioning the sea creatures and their lives and how much Ro and her father love these animals and are devoted to their well-being and contentment.

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?”

I had a love/hate relationship with this book. It had moments that I truly enjoyed. It also had times where it lulled and I didn't understand where the story was going. Ultimately, this is an internal story of young woman who is struggling to adjust to adulthood after a series of events leave her feeling detached and alone. Her father has disappeared, leaving her with her cold mother. She also struggles with her Korean-American identity. Thow in there some inter-personal relationship struggles and there is a lot going on here.

It's an odd story. I love odd stories so ultimately I enjoyed this. It might throw some people for a loop being that it's in the future, but weirdly the only thing to signal readers this future world is a mutant octopus. It's quirky. It's a quirky book and I enjoyed it, but it wasn't my favorite. However, it was better than a lot of other things I have read.

I had a good time reading this book. It's well-written, clever, and well-thought-out. It also managed to emotionally engage me, and that's always a good sign.

At 30 years of age, Ro (short for Aurora) feels stuck. Growing up and living in New Jersey, she works as a caretaker at the aquarium in her local mall, lives in the same apartment that she has for years since her best friend Yoonhee moved out after getting engaged, and her long term boyfriend Tae is leaving her for a long-term mission to Mars. Her father has also been gone for half her life, disappearing after an expedition into the Bering Vortex in his work as a marine biologist. It was her father's influence that led Ro to her current work however, and her memories of seeing Dolores, the Pacific octopus there, which her father helped discover. Ro is not happy to learn that the aquarium has decided to sell Dolores to a private buyer in an attempt to garner much-needed funding, as it's one of the few remaining links she has to her father.

I think many 30-some year-olds will relate to and empathize with Ro - from growing up Korean-American and the expectations placed on her because of it; the strained relationship she has with her mother; the extent of loss and grief she's had to work through; and simply just trying to find her path in life. Gina Chung writes with an astute yet sympathetic voice, alternating Ro's present to memories of her past. We get to see the impact her father had on her childhood, the strained marriage that evolved because of his work, and how her relationship with Tae developed and ended.

In a way, this novel felt like a modern coming-of-age as Ro attempts to unravel the complicated tangle of her life, and she's a protagonist that I couldn't help but cheer for. The novel is told from a first person perspective which worked well, and lets readers get insight into her emotions and thoughts. There are a number of poignant passages scattered throughout the novel, and it's clear that Chung pulls from her own personal experiences in this story.

Very much a recommended read and one I'm sure others will love after its publication in March 2023!

**I received a copy of this ARC from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.**

4.5 stars!
This was a seriously impressive debut novel by Gina Chung. You might pick up this book and think - are octopus friend books becoming a thing? But this feels entirely different than that, in the best way. Ro is a Korean American, mid 30's woman working in a mall aquarium. She mostly works there because of her Dad, who she can't come to grips with as being gone, and because he had found Dolores (octopus). Ro drinks too much and can't seem to move on from her ex. She disassociates from the people closest to her, her mom and best friend and finds comfort in Dolores. Sea Change is a slow, hopeful and very unique novel.

Gina Chung's novel, Sea Change, is a wonder of a debut. I was first introduced to Chung's luminous fiction via her short stories that have appeared extensively in literary journals (AND will be published in her first story collection next year!) and was (and am still) amazed that a writer with such exquisite, clear prose, nuanced and complicated characters, and tightly woven story arcs can sustain structural precision, narrative tension, and the most gutting range of emotional resonance in a book-length work. Reading Sea Change is like a master class in how to write fiction and I am absolutely here for it.

Ro, a 30something Korean American and Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus who changes color to indicate her mood, are at the center of this deeply moving story. Ro is struggling--her boyfriend has recently left her for a mission to Mars, her best friend since childhood is getting married and growing away from Ro, and her distance from her mother feels as wide as the 50-mile stretch of ocean her father was lost in when she was a teenager. She is drifting through her days working at a New Jersey mall aquarium and drinking her nights away when it is announced that Dolores, her strongest link to to her father, is being sold to a wealthy investor, Ro teeters on the edge, drawn dangerously toward self-destruction and the oblivion alcohol provides, weaving through her memories and trauma, hoping to find her way out.

Sea Change is magic, deserving of all the pre-publication anticipation and excitement, and Chung is an immense talent whose books will be on my forever TBR list from now on.

Sea Change is a surprising little gem of a book. I was drawn in by the promise of octopus friendship, but I stayed for the incredibly relatable (human) protagonist.

Ro is floundering. Her boyfriend has left to embark on a literal mission to Mars, she is still mourning her missing-presumed-dead father, her mother is “difficult”, and her best friend is seemingly beating her at the Game of Life. Ro’s one source of happiness is Dolores, an octopus she cares for at the aquarium where her father once worked, and where Ro is now employed. But when someone expresses interest in purchasing Dolores, Ro spirals out of control.

Gina Chung’s debut is utterly charming. I couldn’t help but empathize with Ro; I think we all reach the “what am I doing with my life” point at one time or another. Chung treats Ro’s story with real tenderness. Chung’s writing is fluid, and a genuine joy to read. To be honest, I have very little patience for novels about the problems of people in their twenties, but this one was constantly compelling.

Sea Change is a light read, addressing issues such as family, love, societal pressure, growing up, making bad choices, and sea life. It is incredibly well-written, and contains a lot of warmth.

I didn’t want to write a negative review, but the protagonist of this novel is so, so negative, how could I not?

I was excited to read this book when I heard it was about “climate change, giant Pacific octopuses, and family.” Unfortunately, it’s not about climate change at all and very scantly about the giant octopus. I would argue it’s not about family, either: it’s about one person’s narcissistic nothingness. The novel floats around in one girl’s depression and alcoholism with almost no plot development whatsoever. She is terrible to everyone around her yet blames them for her failures and also somehow thinks of herself as better than them in her relentless complaining about how horrible they are. She thinks badly of herself, too, but gives us no reason why she shouldn’t. She has no agency and her only acts of kindness are in weak apology for her own horribleness.

I hate being negative, but the book made me feel so negative the whole time. So if that was the goal, to make the reader as depressed as the protagonist, the author succeeded. Normally I would simply put a book down if I don’t like it but I received an advanced reader copy from NetGalley for my honest opinion so I felt obliged to finish the book and compose my thoughts.

One star for the scenes with the octopus, which were the bright point of the book, although the way this plot point resolved was… shruggie emoji? It make me wish the author had actually written a story about octopuses. It’s a bummer because I read a short story she wrote about a praying mantis and was delighted. More animal stories, please!

Chung weaves past and present narratives together seamlessly into a beautiful novel about loss, fractured relationships and healing. Though Ro obviously is a flawed character, her struggles are very relatable and her character arc is one that left me ultimately satisfied.

I also loved the sci-fi elements of Mars missions and genetically altered sea animals due to pollution. It gave the story an extra dimension that made it an excellent read.

Ro is stuck. When she’s not binge drinking and lamenting the end of her relationship with Tae, who has left her to go on a mission to Mars, she is sulking at work at the aquarium where she has never seemed valued and her best friend seems to be un-bestfriending her. The only good thing she has going is her relationship with Dolores- a giant octopus her now missing father discovered on one of his expeditions.
Told between present day and in flashbacks to her life growing up, the story weaves through complicated family dynamics, friendships, relationships, and Ro’s own conflicted feelings for herself.
This started out slow for me, but when it got going I couldn’t put it down. The mother/daughter relationship was tense and heartbreaking, but in the end, heartfelt and enduring.
I also now want an octopus.

4.25 stars out of 5!!

“After Tae left, I basically coped with it by not coping at all. I’ve been broken up with before, but never because the guy in question was actually planning on leaving the planet.”


Ahhh yes, that awkward phase when your boyfriend breaks up with you so he can move to Mars and it’s really triggering because your dad disappeared in a mysterious void in the ocean years ago causing you deep-set abandonment issues, but your best friend isn’t really there for you because your spiral is too selfishly destructive for her to handle and your relationship with your Korean immigrant mom has always been precarious, so your only comfort is in a giant octopus that your aforementioned missing father discovered in aforementioned oceanic void but she’s being sold to a multi-billionaire and you’re coping with all of it by not really coping, and drunkenly reflecting on all the memories of growing up in a home that made love and leaving two impossibly tangled concepts that messes with your ability to function in any relationships as an adult. YEAH.. IT’S A LOT.

Ok honestly though, this is another one of those books that kind of snuck up on me in the way it easily grasped my heart and, using a very unrelatable plot line, touched a lot of things that many of us can intimately relate with:

The out-of-body sense of loneliness that can permeate every corner of a person’s life.

Being a child whose understanding of the world is shaped by the mess their parents have made.

How animals can sometimes feel more like friends to us than humans, or at least are easier to be ourselves with.

The fear and avoidance that comes from knowing what great potential for loss there is in this life.

Unresolved traumas dictating your self-worth.

The way we learn that seemingly inconsequential moments of our childhoods swallowed pieces of us and spit them out into the flawed and messy people we become as adults.

This book really is such an interesting read, and one whose MC develops a lot throughout the story. Through flashbacks to childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, we really get to know Ro’s innermost pains and desires, and it’s easy to become invested in the outcome of her story.

“It seems to me incredibly cruel that no matter how much has been taken from you, you never get used to the dizzying shock of losing something you love, the dull, crushing ache of it afterward. There’s no way to rehearse for heartbreak, no matter how much you might walk around expecting it.”


“It seems unfair to me that we don’t get to pick and choose the memories that stay with us – which memories become embedded and bound into the sinews and seams of who we are, and which we lose.”


What I liked most about this book was how Ro’s relationship to her Umma is described and felt. The perpetually confounding and contradictory (oftentimes even contemptuous) relationship dynamics between an immigrant Asian mother and her daughter hit close to home, especially the way that Ro’s perception of her mother was shaped as a young child seeing her mother behave in ways that felt distant, unpredictable, and straight up senseless at times. Through the years and through everything though, there is a quiet tenderness and an unshakeable presence that Umma brings into Ro’s life at every turn, one that will tell her a lot about herself.

“The guilt sits on my tongue like a thick oily sheen, a reminder that nothing I do or say can free me from my parents, no matter how far away or how gone they feel, until it chokes everything else inside me.”


The more I think about this book, the more I get from it. It really was a lot more meaningful than I had expected. I will definitely recommend it to the people in my life, especially the girlies who know what it’s like to be thrown into the dark ocean of your mind, and to learn how to drag yourself to shore in the middle of the storm.

Ro is like so many of us. She doesn’t understand this life, is deeply wounded by it, looks for ways to escape and dissociate from it, and eventually, also explores what it’s like to be wholeheartedly, a part of it.

“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.”


*Thank you to Netgalley, and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage and Anchor for this advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. I’m so glad I had the chance to read it!*

What a gorgeous debut novel from Gina Chang.

Ro is in her mid thirties and struggling with the recent loss of her boyfriend, the childhood loss of her dad, is in the process of loosing the relationship with her both her childhood best friend and her 20 or so year relationship with the captive octopus Dolores. Sea Change moves between the present and Ro's memories to unpack Ro's relationships.

I’d recommend this for an immersive, melancholy yet hopeful read, which will stay with you. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

I tried but I just could not get into this book. It’s super weird, which is fun, but the writing feels very obscure.

A great weekend read for when it’s too cold to get outside! It’s easy to lose yourself within the pages of this story and before you know it, you’ve read the whole thing!

Ro is the daughter of Korean immigrants struggling to overcome grief and loss. It takes the biggest loss of all, an octopus named to Dolores to get her to switch gears and move forward rather than wallow in the past. The disappearance of her father when she was younger has remained an open wound for years. Dolores, who her father found on a research trip in the Pacific, was the one thing that kept the hope alive that he might come back one day. Nights of drinking and just existing caused Ro to just coast in life with no real direction or purpose. But the thought of losing her cephalopod friend opens her eyes to what she’s missed and what she might miss if she doesn’t take life by the reigns and redirect herself toward a life she can be proud of.

What drew me to this book is the undeniable connection humans can have with animals. Truthfully, my favorite part of the story was the lesson in animal behavior. It’s easy to empathize with Ro because her childhood isn’t all rainbows. It was really stormy at times and she definitely has a hardened shell with all the loss she has in life. But she grows throughout the story and realizes she can be and experience so much more.

Thanks so much to NetGalley, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage and Anchor as well as Gina Chung for the opportunity to read this before it hits the shelves

SEA CHANGE is both an exploration of grief and a celebration of resiliency. It’s not a light story, but a beautiful one that sweeps us into the life of Ro, a 30-something Korean American woman as she navigates a difficult period in her life, through a haze of depression and uncertainty.

Ro recently broke up with her boyfriend. She’s not close with her mom, and her best friend since childhood, Yoonhee, seems to be pulling away as she plans her wedding. In addition, Ro is still grieving for her father, who disappeared on a sea expedition 15 years before.

Ro’s one remaining connection with Apa is Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus, who lives in the aquarium where she works. But Dolores has been sold to a rich collector, so Ro faces the prospect of losing Dolores, too.

There’s a touch of science fiction in SEA CHANGE that I love. Ro’s boyfriend, Tae, is on a mission to colonize Mars in expectation that Earth will at some point in the foreseeable future become uninhabitable. Dolores was found in the Bering Vortex, a place where the world’s toxic pollutants have collected and produced unexpected genetic alterations in sea life. Dolores is bigger, smarter, and older than other giant Pacific octopuses, and Ro feels a special connection to the wise cephalopod. The world’s weather patterns are changing, and the Earth’s animals are in greater danger than ever.

I loved the way Chung told Ro’s story in the present with flashbacks to her childhood. I enjoyed being immersed in Korean American culture. And Ro felt so real I felt I could step through the page and give her an (awkward) hug.

It would be impossible not to compare SEA CHANGE with Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures. Where RBC is cute, SEA CHANGE is contemplative. Where the storylines in RBC are wrapped up neatly (and improbably) in the final pages, SEA CHANGE allows the reader to draw their own conclusions, although the end is both satisfying and uplifting. Dare I say I enjoyed SEA CHANGE more?

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an e-ARC of SEA CHANGE in exchange for an honest review.

For me, this was a very slow read. I enjoyed the story, but it's one I never found myself excited to pick up again and finish, which is why it took a couple of weeks. It deals with family, ex-boyfriends, friends, and a giant octopus at an aquarium. Very unique and interesting, just not a page turner. Thank you so much to NetGalley for the ARC.