Morgan Rogers Knihy

When her mother disappears without a trace during a weekend trip, Florine Gilham's idyllic childhood is turned upside-down. Until then, she'd been blissfully insulated by the rhythms of family life in her small coastal Maine town. Her days were spent watching from the granite cliffs for her father's lobster boat to come into port, making bread with her grandmother, and infiltrating the summer tourist camps with her friends. But with her mother gone, the heart falls out of Florine's life and she and her father struggle to manage their loss. Florine will have to find her way to young adulthood - even as she clings to the hope that her mother will return and her life, as she knew it, will continue. Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea is written in the voice of a feisty young heroine and filled with the dry wit that people on the coast of Maine are famous for. With Fannie Flagg's humor and Elizabeth Strout's sense of place, this debut is an extraordinary snapshot of a bygone America through the eyes of an inspiring girl blazing her own path to womanhood.

Set against the backdrop of a picturesque Maine fishing village, the story follows newlyweds Florine and Bud as they celebrate their marriage while grappling with the unresolved mystery of Florine's mother, who disappeared years ago. As they navigate the challenges of building their life together and raising a family, unexpected clues about her mother's fate emerge, intertwining their personal journey with the pursuit of truth. The novel offers a blend of emotional depth and vibrant coastal scenery, appealing to fans of compelling character-driven narratives.

A refreshingly timely and relatable debut novel about a young woman whose life plans fall apart when she meets her wife. With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls' trip to Vegas to celebrate. She's a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn't know...until she does exactly that. This one moment of departure from her stern ex-military father's plans for her life has Grace wondering why she doesn't feel more fulfilled from completing her degree. Staggering under the weight of her father's expectations, a struggling job market and feelings of burnout, Grace flees her home in Portland for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows. In New York, she's able to ignore all the annoying questions about her future plans and falls hard for her creative and beautiful wife, Yuki Yamamoto. But when reality comes crashing in, Grace must face what she's been running from all along--the fears that make us human, the family scars that need to heal and the longing for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood.