The sea wall has broken during one of the worst hurricanes in known history, destroying New York City and the northeastern coast. Climate change ravages the world with power outages, water shortages, and the slow erosion of society inland.

So mudlarks are born.

People who can enter the ravaged city and scavenge for things the government needs that live under the brackish water of the city. Neko and Iggy, two seasoned mudlarks with their own license and crew, take their apprentices Harriet and Jules on a job that's a little legal a little illegal that changes everything.

Neko finds a master CD of her vanished mother's old band The Nightjars. This request from a mysterious client makes her ask something that's plagued her for the last twenty years: is Jenny Sweet still alive somehow?

I finished Mudlark and had dreams about it. Moving, emotional, sometimes a little too busy, but man it stuck to me so badly. This wasn't about the apocalypse or survival or high-octane action. This was about the struggle of mothers and daughters, the meaning of motherhood, love and purpose and how they don't always intersect, and what it means to let go.

Heavy on the musical themes, a lot of that is lost on me. I am not a big music person, but it didn't detract from the meaning of the story at all. I got to watch the present-day and past-day perspectives of Jenny and her interactions with her daughter, Neko, as the girl grows up and as her relationship with Neko's father - Max - deteriorates. We see Jenny's perspective on herself and interactions with Neko, then present-day Neko's interpretation of those moments.

Neko idealizes her father, then slowly becomes disillusioned with him. She also repeats her mother's patterns in a different, subtler way despite not having her around after the age of 13 when the hurricane hit. She carries immense guilt with her over her mother's disappearance, a childhood acting-out gone awry meant her mother was in their apartment. Right where the blast zone of the breaking sea walls were.

We follow Neko's life and her complicated relationship with the ghost of her mother and her own guilt. When she gets the chance to uncover the mystery of Jenny Sweet and kindles the hope she might be alive, she jumps on the opportunity and becomes singular to it. Iggy, her partner of twenty years, struggles to understand or reconcile this dogged pursuit of a mother who's been out of her life more than in it and it causes them to expose their feelings about their relationship, each other, the futures they want, and how a relationship can slowly fray over time no matter how strong.

As someone with a strained relationship with her mother because I felt alien to her my whole life, this hit so many chords for me (pun!). I also watched my dad descend into the cruel abyss of dementia until I lost him and have had many relationships face the question of whether or not the futures we want are irreconcilable. I was very touched by a lot of themes in this book and a lot of parts it explored. It broke my heart so badly, but I also welcomed it because it was about the tragedy of change and acceptance. There's a certain kind of complexity to being a misunderstood daughter with a mother who can't comprehend you, but likewise it changes as you grow and understand the truth: your parents are, in the end, just people. Specht captures that layered experience from both angles - the mother doing her best and the daughter who feels like she's the problem.

I loved watching Neko piece together her mother and learn how to lay down the specter of her. She had unknowingly shaped her life around this understanding of Jenny and the weight of her sense of responsibility for everything that happened. her subtle mirror to her mother and Max's relationship, her unknowing reticence at motherhood that echoed Jenny's, her desire to help without grand dreams of heroism... there are parts of our parents that make their ways into ourselves whether we want it or not. We become echoes of them - less strong and faded, but the same song. Neko and Jenny shared so much across time that they never got the chance to see in one another, but I got to see it as the reader. It was so bittersweet and I just wanted to yell at Neko that Jenny loves her and tell Jenny she's a good mom.

The ending, I felt, gutted a part of me. So much upheaval and change that I was dizzy about it. Things I thought would be immutable truths of human connection broke and reforged, changing the entire trajectory of lives beyond just Neko and Iggy. But that's always how it works, right? We stagnate and get comfortable for a while until something in us chafes for change as we grow without noticing. We become archons of change and growth and it means we need a bigger cage or a wider enclosure. Neko and Iggy show us how there are ways we change that are too much to hold onto - perpendicular winds that take us in all sorts of directions where we can't follow each other not matter how hard we try.

Mudlark was bitter and warm and hopeful and lost at the same time. In the vein of Station Eleven or Shark Heart, Specht takes an experiment with a setting and uses it to share an intimate story of mothers and daughters and how to forgive ourselves. I loved this a lot more than I expected to and I hope, when it releases on the 21st, you do the same.