Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea begins with a deeply emotional jolt: Carlie Gilham goes missing during a weekend trip, leaving her daughter Florine to face adolescence in a hardscrabble Maine fishing community during the 1960s. Did Cassie meet an unthinkable fate? How does Florine move forward without knowing if she should feel bereaved or just abandoned? For all the situation's potential for existential angst, though, Morgan Callan Rogers's debut novel is not moody or weighty. It is, instead, a languidly paced, absorbing coming-of-age story with an enticing sense of time and place and a likable heroine whose singular circumstances give way to the more universal strains and awakenings of growing up.
Rogers, a native to the shipbuilding city of Bath, Maine, paints a picture of a comforting--if insular--world where Florine's friends and their families have lived intertwined with each other for generations. But Florine's family life crumbles as her lobsterman father eventually slips back into a relationship with an old girlfriend and her grandmother begins to show signs of age, even as the dynamics of her own lifelong friendships shift with burgeoning sexualities. The memory of her mother, and the mystery of the disappearance, haunt Florine but also shape her in unexpected ways. What will keep readers engaged to the end is not the ultimate fate of Florine's mother, but Rogers's well-drawn portrait of how a traumatized girl will become a woman. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic