Aurora (Ro) feels like everyone in her life is moving on while she's standing still. She's about to turn 30, and all her old friends and classmates are getting married and having kids. Yoonhee, her childhood best friend, is now a bride-to-be with a fancy job in fundraising. Her longtime boyfriend, Tae, took a gamble and applied for a long-shot opportunity --- and now he's among the first group of people selected for a privately funded trip to settle on Mars. Even her mother has started dating again.

"Fiction in which young adult characters recognize the full humanity of their parents --- their intricacies and flaws --- is nothing new, but Chung addresses these issues with unusual perception and care."

And, of course, Ro continues to be haunted by the mysterious moving on of her father, a marine biologist who disappeared on a research trip when she was 15. Ro always shared her father's interest, and that bond between them only grew after his disappearance. For the past several years, Ro has worked at the same New Jersey mall aquarium where he was once employed. She adores many of the animals who live there, but especially Dolores, an octopus who Ro’s father rescued from a particularly polluted section of the ocean when Ro was a teen.

Yoonhee, who works in development at the aquarium, informs Ro that in order to make ends meet, they are going to sell Dolores to a wealthy investor from Palo Alto. How can Dolores leave Ro, too? Frustrated, scared and aimless, Ro spends her evenings after work getting so drunk she can hardly stand up (let alone drive safely), turning away from people like her cousin, her mother and even Yoonhee, who still need her.

SEA CHANGE, Gina Chung's debut, is awash in effective and moving storytelling. Ro's narrative moves from her current reality (which is clearly set a few years into the future) to key moments from her childhood and youth. This mostly serves to illustrate the complex relationships that Ro had with both of her parents, and the perhaps even more complex relationship they had with one another. As an adult, Ro is only beginning to recognize and acknowledge this.

Ro's adult self, especially in the first three-quarters of the book, can feel stagnant. Counterintuitively, it's the flashbacks that seem to have the most forward momentum, as readers (and eventually Ro herself) begin to adjust their perspective on who this woman is and who she might yet become.

Fiction in which young adult characters recognize the full humanity of their parents --- their intricacies and flaws --- is nothing new, but Chung addresses these issues with unusual perception and care. "Even in my most vivid recollections of him," Ro realizes near the end of the novel, "he never seems to be quite there; he seems to already be leaving us." Making the deliberate choice to stay, to be present and available to her family and friends, is not a radical move. However, for Ro, it is both difficult and essential.