Stacy R. Ward’s absorbing young adult novel explores deep issues of childhood neglect and environmental contamination through the eyes of its teenage protagonist.

As soon as she receives emancipation from the courts, Meaghan Pullman leaves Ohio and hightails it to San Diego to live and work with her Aunt Tessa, captain of the oceanic explorer ship Research Vessel Sojourner. The ship’s crew is documenting scientific exploration and environmental issues, and Meg seeks an internship aboard the ship so she can apply for a marine engineering scholarship. With some ingenuity, she becomes part of the crew.

The novel skillfully alternates between Meg’s current ship duties and past interviews she had with child protection services. About her dysfunctional, hoarding mother, she says: “I think it would be so much easier if I hated her… But how do you truly blame someone so broken for being… broken?”

Meg navigates ship politics, becomes friends with her roommate Izabel, begins a tentative relationship with science intern Joe, and starts to see some of the world’s big oceanic environmental crises. While helping on one of the scientific expeditions, she also meets a whale with whom she finds kinship. Meanwhile, she and her aunt struggle to contact her mother.

Ward is an adept storyteller who creates, in Meg, a complex, layered character with an authentic teenage voice. The dialogue is crisp, and the story comes alive through vivid details and the environmental hazards and emergencies Meg and crew face along the way. At one point, the ship runs into what is known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: “Soles of shoes, plastic bottles, big white plastic buckets that maybe contained donut icing or some other instant-gratification-trans-fat-bullshit float against the boat, their fellows stretching out as far as I can see. It’s Mom’s house emptied. Magnified.”

Poems interspersed between chapters—told from a whale’s viewpoint—are sometimes more preachy than poetic, but that’s a quibble.

Readers will eagerly turn pages to see if Meg can overcome her past to achieve her dreams – and will hope a sequel is on the way.

Also available in hardcover and ebook.