OYSTER POND is a literary novel set in 1982 Chatham, Massachusetts, a small fishing town on the brink of economic and environmental collapse. Eighteen-year-old Dinah Wall believes her family is cursed: the men are doomed to drown, and the women are left to watch. Her father, Donnie, is increasingly withdrawn, carving seagulls on the porch while hiding a growing shame about a mistake at work. Her aunt Carol—the first female boat captain in Chatham—holds the family together with grit and salt, until one day a boy named Ronan washes into their lives.

Ronan is everything Dinah wants to believe in: kind, steady, unafraid of the sea. Carol gives him a job on the boat; Dinah brings him home for dinner. As the two grow closer, Dinah’s superstitions harden into fear. If the curse is real—and Dinah is sure it is—loving Ronan will kill him. So she does what she thinks she has to: she pushes him away in the only way she knows how.

Told in prose that mirrors the rhythms of the Cape, where salt, story, and superstition intertwine, Oyster Pond weaves together personal and generational trauma with the mythic logic of folklore. Dinah sees signs in the tides, omens in the fog, meaning in every shift of the wind. Her tide book—obsessively maintained, filled with dates, water levels, and patterns only she understands—is one of the ways her undiagnosed OCD shapes her world. It’s a private system of order in a life marked by instability. But the deeper truth—the one she can’t quite name—is that the real danger isn’t the curse, but the grief and silence that surround her family. As the fishing season draws to a close, Dinah must confront what’s been buried: the cost of her father’s decline, the weight of her mother’s denial, and the stories she’s been telling herself to survive.

Set against the backdrop of rising fuel prices, federal regulations, and the slow death of working-class maritime life, Oyster Pond is a haunting coming-of-age story about love, loss, and the stories we inherit—whether we want them or not.

With the sensual intimacy of The Paper Palace and the mythic resonance of Sharks in the Time of Saviors, Oyster Pondwill appeal to readers drawn to emotionally layered fiction where folklore, place, and trauma are deeply entwined. Inspired by the author’s time on Cape Cod and her fascination with the way folklore conceals and reveals intergenerational harm, the novel asks: how do we break a cycle when we’ve mistaken it for fate?