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Overview
The USA Today bestselling author of On Earth as It Is on Television returns with an earnest, humorous novel on the pressures of adult life, the magic of childhood, and what swims in between.
As a lonely ten-year-old resident of Pearl Island, Jenni Farrow befriends Timmy Caruso and together they enjoy a glorious summer of swimming, fireworks, and carnival rides. (Not to mention rescuing a strange sea creature from a tidepool). Then, one late summer day, Timmy disappears.
Thirty years later, Jenni—now Jenn Lanaro, bestselling author of the Philipia Bay action-romance series—is desperate to escape the fatigue of her career and her soon-to-be-ex-husband. With her Pokémon-obsessed children in tow, Jenn rents a summer house on Pearl Island. But shortly after she arrives, a boy emerges from the nighttime sea. His name, he says, is Timmy Caruso. He’s ten years old. And he’s on a mission to save the world.
In the days that follow, Jenn grapples with work deadlines, her own spirited children, the mysterious boy-from-the-sea, and her burgeoning interest in a very sexy contractor. But when alarming events unfold along the coast—shark attacks, tidal waves, a proliferation of sugar-addicted sea creatures, and a terror out in the deeper water—she wonders if just maybe the young boy knows what he’s doing after all?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781368108591 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Disney Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/28/2025 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The First Day of Summer Break
Nothing happened the way it was supposed to happen according to novels and TV shows and the self-help manuals Jenn had gorged, naively, in the optimistic early years of mother-slash-wifehood.
Or the magazines. A woman could Do It All, the magazines said.
The husband, for example, was not supposed to file for divorce, because, as he explained over a series of text messages, in which he did not bother even to fix the typos caused by autocorrect, he did not feel actualized.
He had not cultivated his innermost potential or activated his Power Nucleus.
It was not, he insisted, because he had read that self-help manual—Bond with the Man You Were Always Meant to Be by Danz Landry, motivational profiteer and CEO of the Male Actualization Society (MAS).
It was not because of her. The book said he had to seize ownership of his actions.
. . . But it was because of her.
The husband was a salesman. He had a name that belonged to a salesman, or a mortgage broker, or a mid-level mob boss: Charles (Chuck) Lanaro. When she met him, he worked at a car dealership. He had a special talent for upselling. Warranties. Fake-leather leather seats. Sunroofs. Her name was still Jenni Farrow when they met, but then she got married and became Jenn Lanaro. Then she wrote a book and became, in pen name only, Jennifer Lamour, New York Timesbestselling author of the Philipia Bay series, now on paperback book number twenty-nine.
Philipia Bay was not acclaimed, poignant, powerful, meaningful, or particularly well written. Philipia Bay was action smut. But the people wanted what the people wanted.
Chuck Lanaro wanted to know: What were you trying to say when you picked that yodel for the book cover?
Chuck Lanaro followed up with his own semi-answer: It was insulting.
And then another: Just another thing to add to the List of Underminstances.
Jenn could only assume that “yodel” meant “model.” There was nothing yodelish about the man on the cover of Philipia Bay and the Castle of Castaways, with his resplendent hair and rippling abs. The mystery was why her husband’s autocorrect had converted model to yodel. What did this say about him as a person?
She made a note for her future lawyer.
Underminstances was not a word, except in MAS-speak. Jenn had looked it up on the internet. Catalog your underminstances, Danz Landry directed in his instructional video series. Catapult your awareness of events in which the fazemeister voice attempts to undermine you. Understanding is the first step on the road to control.
It was a fallacy, Jenn wanted to tell her husband, to assume that any of us could have control.
After they got married, and the first Philipia Bay book appeared on the impulse-buy endcap at the checkout line at the Value Valley, and the first double line appeared on the pregnancy pee-test, Chuck Lanaro was glad—elated, over the moon—to give his two weeks’ notice to the dealership and trade his sales pitch for rubber dishwashing gloves and embrace the stay-at-home-dad lifestyle. He mastered sleep cycles and potty training. He met other baby-strapped dads for playdates at the park. As the children grew, he filled the school day hours with hobbies and projects—woodworking, drywalling, aerobic kickboxing, disassembling and reassembling the washing machine, cryptocurrency trading, stalking the backyard racoons with his BB gun. The racoons had been digging through the trash again, underminstancing his efforts to contain it neatly in its proper bin.
Jenn should have known, when she spotted him hiding in the bushes, in camo, with night-vision goggles.
Chuck had never gone hunting. He had never fired a real gun. He had grown up in New Jersey, a subway ride away from Manhattan. He had, as a dealer of cars, professed to enjoy art museums and symphonies and duckpin bowling. Yet his hobbies bespoke a stereotypical masculinity, a reactionary pattern, as if selected in outlash. Against what? The rubber dish gloves? He was the one who said they protected his skin. He didn’t have to wear them.
He didn’t have to hire a process server to serve her with his petition for divorce either. He didn’t have to start the ending chapter of their marriage by lawyering up. He could have just conveniently disappeared, like her own biannual-greeting-card father. He could have waited at least until she’d finished edits on Philipia Bay and the Pirates of Pandago Cove. Or until the children had finished school for the year. Or until she had figured out what to do with her mother’s Pearl Island house, which was, after several years, no doubt overrun by dust mites, spiders, ants, palmetto bugs, and all the detritus left in the wake of sudden departure.
But no.
Chuck Lanaro rented himself a furnished town house, three bedrooms, two baths, in a gated community with a pool and tennis courts. In April, when Jenn Lamour flew to Las Vegas to attend a romance writers convention, Chuck Lanaro packed his bags and moved out.
Jenn: Can’t we at least talk about this in person?
Jenn: What about the kids?
Jenn: You think you’re the only one who’s been unhappy?
Jenn: Fine, I’m hiring a lawyer
Jenn: I can’t believe you.
Jenn: You are so petty. Seriously. And after my mom just died.
Chuck: That was three bears ago
Chuck: I am noting that you have perpetrated yet another underminstance
Jenn: Because I called you petty?
Chuck: Don’t pretend you don’t know damn well what you did
Jenn: What about the kids?
Chuck: What do you mean, what about the kids?
Chuck: I always take care of them. It makes more sense for them to live with me
The kids were supposed to have reacted to the news of their parents’ divorce with anguish, angst, blame—self- and parent-directed—perhaps misconduct and shenanigans. A fist fight, for example. Biting, hairpulling. Intentionally neglected school assignments. They were not supposed to passively accept their broken home fate.
“So?” Jenn asked them, after she’d explained that sometimes mommies and daddies didn’t get along, but that didn’t mean that it was anyone’s fault.
“So?” Evie replied.
Mason put back on his cat-ear headphones and pressed play on the video-gaming talk show–esque program that he had begrudgingly agreed to pause for the divorce spiel.
“So . . . we are getting divorced.”
“So?”
“And I just wanted to talk to you both about, well— Mason, could you please take those off again?”
Mason tapped on his headphones to indicate that he couldn’t hear her with them on.
“Is this because of the underminstances?” Evie asked.
“What? No. No. Is that what Dad said?”
“He has the list taped to the fridge in his kitchen.”
“He—that is just—no! I have been nothing but kind and respectful to your father, and this is just, it’s—”
“He asked me to report any trash-talking,” Evie said. “For the list. But can I go now?”
“Go? Where are you going?”
“Just, you know, to the couch.” Evie pointed to the couch, where the tablet and the console sat together without her.
“This is—Don’t you want to talk about it? As a family? Evie? Mason?”
Jenn pulled the earphones away from Mason’s ears. Mason snarled. He yanked them back on and clamped his hands down over them.
“You just told us,” Evie said. “But we already knew, because Dad told us when he moved out, like, six weeks ago. What else is there to say?”
These were children born into a world that was, according to every scientific measure everywhere, careening toward its own destruction.
These were children that had heard their parents discuss, in hushed but drunkenly audible voices, the tragedies that permeated Modern Life. Hurricanes. Droughts. Shootings. Etcetera. When adult-talk started up, these children put on their headphones, turned on their screens, and then complained at bedtime because six straight hours hadn’t been nearly screen time enough.
She was supposed to say something heartfelt, something meaningful enough to permeate the child-screen bond. Something her own mother might have said, in the slim band of time between work and bed, or work and work. She should have held them in her arms and assuaged the doubts that, well, honestly the doubts that belonged to her. She had been, in her distraction, unwittingly lenient with the children. She ignored them, and this led to excess YouTube. Too many snacks. Too often she let them subsist on plain noodles with butter. Now they were detached. She had sacrificed Quality Family Time for Mom’s Gotta Work. She had a flimsy excuse.
Someone had to work, she had told herself.
Chuck: It could have been me. But you insisted.
Had she insisted?
Chuck: Admit it. You wanted to work.
Chuck: You love work more than you love me.
Well maybe now she did. Now that he was keeping a list on his fridge where the kids could see it.
She should have at least sat on the couch between the children so they could all stare at their devices together as a family. But Mason had already requisitioned the center cushion for his stuffed animals. Evie made a shoo-shooing motion with her hand. Get away, Mom. So Mom went into the kitchen and poured herself a beer glass full of wine, because Chuck had given himself full custody of all the wineglasses.
She sat down at the table with her laptop and a tube of Potato-Wizard Cheddar Crisps. She was supposed to work on edits. She was supposed to feel grateful for the continued success of Philipia Bay. She had loved Philipia Bay when she wrote the first book. Maybe more than she loved Chuck, though present-day-Chuck inevitably colored her memory of past-Chuck with a douchey tint. She had wanted nothing more than to write more books with Philipia Bay, books brimming with treasure and romance, where villains got sent to prison or mauled by bears or devoured by snakes. Where everything turned out the way it should. Her readers wanted the same. More Philipia Bay. But by book five, she was bored. In book eight—Philipia Bay and the Congress of Sabotage—she tried something new. She made Philipia Bay fall in love. Then she killed the lover. Then Philipia discovered she was pregnant with the lover’s child and was faced with an untenable choice: Give up the child or let the sabotage of democracy go unpunished. Her editor said no. No tough choices. Her readers hated tough choices. She was supposed to stick to the formula.
Almost thirty formulaic books in, she was inexorably stuck. Jenn Lanaro was Jennifer Lamour. Jennifer Lamour was Philipia Bay. Philipia Bay paid the bills. Jenn had no time or inspiration for anything else.
Her phone buzzed. A text, from her editor.
The editor’s name was Betsy Rankleman, a name that the editor lamented as lacking in romantic flair. She was fifty-six. She had no children, which meant that she had time for karate lessons, kickboxing, fencing. The editor herself was svelte, with toned arms and pampered skin and a regimen of Botox. She had a husband who, when they married, in their beautiful bangable twenties, had looked like the cover model from Philipia Bay and the Arrow of Algiers, but now he had a shiny bald patch and a beer gut and a proliferation of moles with hairs growing out of them. But he won’t let me pluck the hairs, the editor said, and he won’t pull them out himself. What am I supposed to do? They did what they could, with the dashing Adonises of Philipia Bay.
Betsy: So . . .???
Betsy: You promised me edits by last week
Betsy: Everything alright?
Jenn replied with an amorphous thumbs-up. She put her phone away. She stared at the words on her laptop screen. Holy Shakespeare, these were terrible words. Absolute crap. She took a gulp of wine. Her phone buzzed:
Chuck: My lawyer will be sending proposals for alimony and child support
Chuck: Since the kids will be staying mostly with me
No. NO! She fumed. She started to type:
Jenn: Screw you, you selfish asswipe. You are not taking my children. I’m not paying you a cent. You can go fuck yourself—
But she didn’t hit Send. Chuck would screenshot the message and add it to his List of Underminstances. That message would make a great demonstrative exhibit for divorce court. Evidence of her motherly ineptitude and incivility. She took a gulp of wine.
She needed to get away.
She needed to go someplace where she could forget all about Chuck.
She needed to put the life she had known behind her.
Her glass was empty.
She refilled it. She typed another cathartic screw-you-Chuck reply. She deleted it. In two days, at 9:00 a.m., Chuck would knock on the door. He would take the children. Mason still in pajamas. Evie with a rat’s nest of unbrushed hair.
What, you can’t even handle getting them dressed in real clothes, Chuck would chide. You can’t even make them brush their hair? They should have been ready.
She wasn’t ready. She wouldn’t see them for five whole days. Chuck would return them with swimming pool tan lines and Whippety-Dip stories and new Pokémon cards, but only for the weekend, and then 9:00 a.m. on Monday would arrive and they would disappear again.
Unless Chuck couldn’t find them.
A devious idea hatched in her mind.
If Chuck couldn’t find them.
If Chuck couldn’t find them . . .
If he knocked on the door at 9:00 a.m. but no one answered. Because no one was home. Because they had left. She took a gulp of wine. The school year had ended. She could work on edits anywhere. She didn’t need to stay here, where Chuck would bogart the children and mansplain her blunders and lambaste her with MAS-speak.
They could just leave. The thought made her giddy. She envisioned herself in Cabo drinking a piña colada from a coconut shell while the children splashed in the crystalline waters. She envisioned Santorini. The Florida Keys. The Gold Coast. The rage on Chuck’s face when he found out. His cheeks red. His nostrils flaring, like a horse.
Except how would she explain a Cabo summer in family court? She couldn’t let the horse win. She needed a plausible excuse for their departure. A sensible destination. A task to accomplish. Such as . . .
Pearl Island.
Her childhood home. Her mother’s house. She had to clean it out. Her mother had died three years ago and the house had sat vacant ever since, collecting mold and ants, springing leaks, stockpiling complaints about the overgrown grass. She had a responsibility to deal with the house, one which now seemed more appealing than procrastination, her long-standing approach. Her mother’s house made for convincing testimony.
Though they couldn’t stay there. The house was—
She saw the house in her mind, as it had been, long ago. Sunlight streamed through the kitchen windows. Her mother stood at the laminate counter, scooping ice cream into the blender, singing along to Joni Mitchell on the record player.
Jenn felt a churning, clenching pain in her gut. A pain she dismissed as just gas. Too much wine. Not enough fruit.
If they went to Pearl Island, they would need a rental house. Something not ghosty, with ocean views. She opened a browser window. She searched for Pearl Island summer rentals. Booked. Booked. Mostly booked except for one week in July. Naturally. Summer had already started.
Except then she saw a house with New Listing written in yellow letters above the picture. She clicked the link. It was beachfront. Four bedrooms. Two and a half baths. Outdoor shower. No swimming pool, unfortunately. She swiped through photos. It didn’t look new inside. The kitchen boasted chestnut cabinets, gold-plated hardware, a dial microwave, ancient appliances in shades of pale yellow and pea green. It opened onto a weather-beaten back deck that overlooked the ocean. A spiral staircase led up to a second deck with a French door to the primary bedroom. Jenn took a gulp of wine. She clicked on the rental calendar. No bookings. Available all summer. It had either just gotten listed that day, or it was haunted. Or a scam. Or all of the above. Her phone buzzed.
Chuck: You didn’t respond to my text.
Chuck: Are you TRYING to be rude or is it just your natural state?
She finished the wine. She felt drunk. Impulsive. Reckless. Furious. She felt like a hurricane force, like Philipia Bay with a pair of nunchucks, a katana holstered to her back, a bladed throwing star that never missed. Except that Chuck was safe inside his town house fortress, protected by lawyers and threats. Her only weapon was a credit card. She wasn’t a force. She was more like a shingle torn from its roof by hurricane winds, hands whipping uncontrollably, tearing the credit card from her wallet, pounding the numbers onto the screen.
Done.
Her face was drenched in tears.
Her phone buzzed.
452B9: This message confirms your booking of SEA LA VISTA
Check in 1-June after 4:00 p.m.
Check out 19-Aug by 10:00 a.m.
No cancellations.
Thank you and enjoy your stay on Pearl Island!