While volunteering at the local aquarium, Violet meets Orion who introduces her to his friends, and to Liv who has a bright curiosity about Violet’s ancestors, the much-celebrated founders of the town. Now exiled to the small seaside town of Lyric, Maine, to live quietly with her uncle, Violet is left to contemplate the sad, parallel tracks of their lives and wonder at how they all crossed into this country from which it seems they couldn’t return. But after Sam’s suicide attempt, they all lost the thread of themselves. Violet was burning bridges just for the joy of seeing the flames take them, numbing herself with sex and alcohol, trying not to look too closely at the unrelenting winnowing of her parents and the distance growing between her and her brother, Sam. Violet Larkin’s family lived in a state where the ground always seemed to be slipping from beneath their feet, with no way back to someplace solid. It lingered in the air, like summer thunder, long after I turned the last page, beaming calmly into all my darkest corners, and the thought of it still warms me, like a candle flame held safe against the whipping sea wind. It felt like a hug, if a hug were a book. Reading The Last Poets of the Sea felt comforting in a way that defies words.

Whether or not they find the Lyric, the journey Violet takes-and the bridges she builds along the way-may be the start of something like survival.

She finds a fellow wreck hunter in Liv Stone, an amateur local historian whose sparkling intelligence and guarded gray eyes make Violet ache in an exhilarating new way. Desperate to make amends, Violet embarks on a wildly ambitious mission: locate the Lyric, lying hidden in a watery grave for over a century. Shipped back to Lyric while Sam is in treatment, Violet is haunted by her family's missing piece-the lost shipwreck she and Sam dreamed of discovering when they were children. And, one beautiful summer day, brilliant, sensitive Sam attempts to take his own life.

Tall, funny, musical Violet can't stop partying with the wrong people. No, Fidelia swam to shore, fell in love, and founded Lyric, Maine, the town Violet and Sam returned to every summer.īut wrecks seem to run in the family. When the Lyric sank off the coast of Maine, their great-great-great-grandmother didn't drown like the rest of the passengers. At least that's what Violet and her younger brother, Sam, were always told.

The Larkin family isn't just lucky-they persevere.

Last true poets of the sea