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A fractured family, a devastated community, and the disaster that brings them together.After the sudden death of his father, Jordan Pearce reluctantly takes over the family's generations-old oyster-farming business on Louisiana's Gulf Coast. He's still adjusting to the new role when the
Deepwater Horizon oil rig explodes offshore, triggering one of the worst environmental disasters in history and throwing his hardscrabble coastal town into crisis.
While looking after his distressed mother, Jordan struggles to keep the company afloat and is forced to seek help from his estranged brother, Benny, a beatnik musician living in New Orleans. In the face of impending tragedy, this small community searches for a way forward, just as the fractured Pearce family, finally reunited under one roof, must find the hope and courage to save their legacy.
"The complex characters and the lovingly described Louisiana setting bring this eco-tragedy sympathetically to life. Recommended to readers of issue-oriented fiction such as Charlotte McConaghy's
Migrations and Barbara Kingsolver's
Demon Copperhead."
-Booklist
About the author
Joselyn Takacs holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Her fiction has appeared in
Gulf Coast,
Narrative,
Tin House,
Harvard Review,
The Rumpus,
DIAGRAM,
Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, and elsewhere. She has published interviews and book reviews in the
Los Angeles Review of Books and
Entropy. Joselyn has taught writing at the University of Southern California and Johns Hopkins University. She lived in New Orleans at the time of the 2010 oil spill, and in 2015, she received a grant to record the oral histories of Louisiana oyster farmers in the wake of the environmental disaster. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband.
