Book of the Day

From the review

Orly Salt catalogs seeds by hand, in the cold underground vault that is the entire reason his family still lives on Shearwater, saying the Latin names out loud the way another eight-year-old might recite the names of dinosaurs. Above him the island is disappearing a little more with every high tide, and his father Dominic keeps that fact mostly to himself, along with a few other things. Then a woman washes up half dead in the worst storm anyone on Shearwater has seen, and the four of them, who thought they'd already lost everything worth losing, find out there's more to lose. McConaghy writes the natural world like she's spent real time in it, and she probably has: the gentoo penguins keeping their argument going outside the window, an albatross riding wind that would kill a person in minutes, the slow ceremony of tending seeds that might outlive every human who planted them. That texture matters, because the plot turns out to be less about the storm than about what everyone on this island is protecting, and from whom. Dominic keeps a version of the truth from his children. Rowan keeps a bigger one from all of them. The chapters move fast between points of view, short and propulsive, so the mystery of why she really came to Shearwater builds at the same clip as whether the family can trust her enough to let her stay.