But before Grace's life can begin, tragedy strikes and threatens to tear her family apart.
The aftermath of bereavement and loss is always confronting, especially within young adult reads as characters are often still forging their own paths in life. My heart ached for the Walker family. While Grace's mother becomes a shadow of her former self, her father throws himself into his work to avoid spending time with his family. Harley begins to isolate himself from Grace, leaving Grace to rely on emotionally absent parents, the ever growing divide between herself and best friend Mia and Jake, Ben's best friend who is content to ride a downward spiral into alcohol and drug abuse, taking Grace along for the ride.
I found Grace's method of coping confronting, but entirely realistic. She's enabled by Jake who is content to drown his sorrows in a cocktail of alcohol and recreational drugs. She feels that no one other than Jake understands the sorrow in her life and cannot see past her own grief as she spirals out of control. As the Walker family unit begins to break down, it's Grace's best friend Mia who is isolated, abused by Grace herself when lashing out all whilst dealing with a drunken sexual assault in which her perpetrator was never held to account. It also highlighted how females who have been sexually assaulted or victims of rape, fail to report the assault to the authorities. I had hoped the friends in Mia's life would have addressed the issue, beyond Ben defending her honour with a show of male dominance. Seeing Mia's light extinguished, her once vibrant persona now withdrawn and I desperately wanted justice for her.
Set within a quintessential Australian coastal town, Sophie Hardcastle weaves a beautifully poignant story of loss, losing your way and how tragedy threatens to drown those left behind. The writing was delicate and lyrical, captivating from the very first page. Sophie Hardcastle is a phenomenal author, who will no doubt become an Australian favourite with teens for many generations to come.
Gazing at the splinters of a life once lived, I finally come to see life for all that it is. We breathe, for a while, and then we come to rest. We become the earth, the clouds and the deep sea currents, the summer swells and the winter tides.