Sea Change

March 1, 2023
An unambitious young woman struggles to cope with the impending loss of the giant, mutated Pacific octopus she cares for. Ro is going through a brutal, albeit unique, breakup: Her longtime boyfriend, Tae, has left her to join a crew that will colonize Mars. Her only solace is taking care of Dolores, an octopus warped to giant size and given extended life by the "Bering Vortex," an agglomeration of chemicals that have turned the Bering Strait into a sort of toxic laboratory filled with "six-finned salmon [and] winged cod." Ro is stuck in the past; she works at the same mall aquarium her father did before he disappeared on a research trip into the Bering Vortex when Ro was a teenager. He brought the octopus back from a previous expedition, and Ro is devastated to learn that Dolores will soon be sold to a wealthy collector, the cousin of the Mars mission's benefactor. All this has the makings of a science fiction mystery or a climate novel, but Chung has instead opted to write an adult bildungsroman, a grappling with childhood's traumas and the tricky process of maturation in the 21st century. Much of the novel is told in flashback. Ro's parents are Korean immigrants, and there was serious tension between her aloof scientist father and her uptight mother, who longed for the country she was raised in. In the present, Ro binge-drinks and blows off texts from her mom and her best friend. In fact, Ro has a drunken driving habit, one that endangers her life and the lives of others, but this is just presented as a symptom of her immaturity. The real problem is that she's lonely, Chung suggests. At a disastrous dinner with her mother, Ro is offered this advice from her mother's new boyfriend: "It's not good to be alone for too long, you know." A debut novel of change, community, and cephalopods.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2023
New novels confronting familial loss and featuring unexpected nonhuman characters seem to be a growing literary thing. The trapped Pacific (yep, that specific) octopus now has earned at least two costarring credits. While not as delightful as Shelby Van Pelt's bestselling Remarkably Bright Creatures (2022), which showcases octopus Marcellus, Chung's first novel also highlights a troubled aquarium employee with a special cephalopodan bond, whose past keeps stalling her future. Ro has never fully accepted that her father, a Korean immigrant marine biologist involved in capturing octopus Dolores in the remote Bering Vortex, went missing 15 years ago. Her critical mother remains mostly distant. Her near-perfect boyfriend decided to go to Mars instead of staying earthbound. Her childhood best friend gets busy planning a wedding. Most nights, Ro just drinks sharktinis into oblivion. "At a certain point," her bff warns, "you're going to have to take ownership of--well, your life," especially with Dolores' sudden sale to a too-rich investor. Creature-loving readers will be lured in, but they may find that Dolores can't inject enough buoyant life into the novel to counter Ro's saturated self-absorption.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2023
In Chung’s delightful and slightly off-kilter debut, a woman comes to terms with her arrested development while bonding with an octopus. Ro, 30, spends her days working a mundane job at a mall aquarium where she cares for Dolores, an octopus her marine biologist father discovered on an expedition. When her best friend and coworker Yoonhee delivers the unfortunate news that a tech investor has bought Dolores as part of a trend among wealthy people to build private aquariums, Ro finally begins dealing with a series of disruptions in her life, among them that Yoonhee is getting married and has distanced herself from Ro. When they get together for drinks, Ro holds awkwardly onto the past, drinking the Mountain Dew cocktails they invented in college while Yoonhee drinks wine. Making matters worse, Ro’s astronaut boyfriend has just broken up with her to join a new colony on Mars, a development she mulls over while watching Dolores’s mating rituals (“I wasn’t about to empathize with a thirsty octopus over her sexual needs when I hadn’t gotten laid in months”). More poignantly, Dolores represents Ro’s last remaining connection to her father, who disappeared during an expedition when she was a teen. As Ro cares for Dolores in the final days before the new owner comes to pick her up, Chung crafts a convincing portrayal of Ro’s grief and self-acceptance. This off-beat tale has heart. Agent: Danielle Bukowski, Sterling Lord Literistic.