Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A poignant yet hopeful novel about a girl navigating grief, trauma, and friendship, from Ashley Herring Blake, the award-winning author of Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World.
Hazel Bly used to live in the perfect house with the perfect family in sunny California. But when a kayaking trip goes horribly wrong, Mum is suddenly gone forever and Hazel is left with crippling anxiety and a jagged scar on her face. After Mum's death, Hazel, her other mother, Mama, and her little sister, Peach, need a fresh start. So for the last two years, the Bly girls have lived all over the country, never settling anywhere for more than a few months.
When the family arrives in Rose Harbor, Maine, there's a wildness to the small town that feels like magic. But when Mama runs into an old childhood friend—Claire—suddenly Hazel's tight-knit world is infiltrated. To make it worse, she has a daughter Hazel's age, Lemon, who can't stop rambling on and on about the Rose Maid, a local 150-year-old mermaid myth.
Soon, Hazel finds herself just as obsessed with the Rose Maid as Lemon is—because what if magic were real? What if grief really could change you so much, you weren't even yourself anymore? And what if instead you emerged from the darkness stronger than before?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Packing an emotional punch, this delicately woven novel by Blake (The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James) features clearly wrought characters who capture the heart. Twelve-year-old Hazel Bly, her mother Evie, and five-year-old sister Peach have moved eight times in the last two years, following the death of the girls' Mum. Wracked with guilt and physically scarred from the event that took Mum's life, Hazel retreats into trying to keep the family safe. Newly arrived in Rose Harbor, Me., for the summer, she finds herself unwilling to face the ocean, once her most treasured escape. After running into neighbor Lemon, also 12, and Lemon's mother, Claire (Evie's childhood friend, it happens), Hazel learns that she's the spitting image of Rosemary Lee, a turn-of-the-century captain's daughter, rumored to have become a mermaid, on whom the seaside town's lore is based. Grieving, prickly Hazel must navigate making friends—including with Kiko, who's of Japanese ancestry, and Jules, who's white and nonbinary—and address her trauma. Slowly unfurling her story, which is resonant with messages about healing, the author invites readers into an exploration of grief, memory, and familial relationships while employing layered metaphors about oceanic fact and fiction. Ages 8–12.
