Sea Change by Gina Chung

Sea Change is a book about a woman who is stuck in a rut and friends with an octopus, but needs to try and change her life before she drifts away. Ro is in her thirties, works in an aquarium where she looks after an octopus who her now-disappeared dad discovered, and is struggling to deal with her boyfriend leaving her to go on a mission to Mars. She’s drinking too much and barely makes time for her childhood best friend, but when she finds out that the octopus, Dolores, is being bought by a rich guy, it becomes clear Ro can’t go on like this.

This is a book with a pretty weird premise—woman whose dad disappeared and ex-boyfriend left to go to Mars is friends with an octopus—but it tells a pretty down to earth story of someone hitting rock bottom and needing to change their life. Ro hides behind the past and the people who’ve left her or let her down, and the novel moves between the present and the past to explore the things that happened that have led her to this point. Though the novel doesn’t have a huge amount of plot, as this kind of narrative often doesn’t, and doesn’t resolve any of the big plot elements that run throughout, meaning that you can end up a bit ‘so what’ by the end, Ro is a gripping character and the unusual backdrop of the novel that is used to tell a story of a downward spiral brings something fresh to the book.

I chose to read Sea Change because of the weird sounding premise, and it does deliver on being partly about a friendship with an octopus. It’s easy to read and enjoyable, exploring a character needing to adapt to change, and though it could go deeper or have more going on, the sense of drifting through it does match up with Ro’s mental state in the book.