Trying to cope with her mother's descent into opioid addiction and a traumatic encounter at school, Larkin ends up bruised and drunk in a hospital emergency room. In the aftermath, Larkin's father decides to send her away to spend the summer with her grandmother in a small coastal village in Nova Scotia. There, she contemplates the virtues of ending her life (poetically, by attempting to swim to PEI) while her grandmother patiently pushes her towards finding hope through making new friends and helping set up a café.
While well-written, the pacing is slow and the themes could easily have been further developed. We're never exactly clear what happened to Larkin back at her school, Meanwhile, the mother and her story doesn't really move beyond a brief recollection (and an even briefer dialog). Mills does a fine job in showing us how sad and depressed Larkin is and in capturing her panic attacks. However, lacking the context deprives us of much of the punch or the necessary reader empathy to make it be something dramatic.
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