Review of Habits of the Sea by Shea Earnshaw

The premise of this novel hooked me, and the relatively slow pacing throughout felt suited to an insular island life that exists outside of time. It's ultimately romantic to the nth degree, with damning climate-change effects that felt somewhat abrupt.

The stormy night Clay Lockhart's wife and children die, he flies into a raging grief, and seemingly as a result of the power of his pain, his home and the land beneath it break from Scotland and float into the sea.

When Ellie Mills is a young girl in Nova Scotia, she stumbles onto Clay and his island and upon stepping foot upon its land, enters into a mysterious time warp. But upon her return home her account is largely dismissed as a delusion. She is almost certain that her experience was real, and the pull of the island haunts her into adulthood, so that she constantly feels as though something is missing from her life.

Now Clay's island has been spied by a cruise ship of passengers, and everyone is now prepared to believe Ellie's original tale, but she is torn. Can she revisit the strange island from her youth, and does she even want to unravel the secrets of that distant memory and place? Will the mysterious man on the island answer her questions or allow her to enter it, if she can even access that strange place again? And with the oddities of time on the island, would she be giving up her predictable yet comfortable future, years of her life, for merely a visit to that strange land?

I appreciated that the floating island and its time warp existed alongside realistic factors here without Earnshaw attempting to explain the circumstances. Why is the island actively drifting around the world? Who knows? Why does it exist within a time vacuum so that those living on it don't age? No clue. It's an invitation to suspend disbelief and roll with it, and I was happy to do so.

I don't know why this house and this land broke away from the mainland all those years ago. I don't know why Clay was swept out to sea, and I don't know why I was drawn here as a young girl, why this island has called to me my whole life. I don't know why time moves strangely against its shores.

Ellie's lifelong yearning for the island leads her to it again, but upon her arrival she immediately seeks to leave. When she is unable to do so, she doubts whether she should have come at all. This self-doubt and wondering takes up the bulk of the page time in the book, and the pacing of all of this is slow (this does suit the island life, which is unchanging apart from weather-related issues). I didn't mind this extensive navel-gazing for a long while, because Earnshaw's writing is lovely, but ultimately I began to grow somewhat impatient.

I was puzzled by a few elements. Clay's intense grief, presumably unprecedented in the world or at least in his part of the world, which was due to the loss of his wife and unborn twins, was powerful to do the impossible: create the island, set it in motion, and form the time warp. Ellie supposes: "Maybe Clay's broken heart severed time, cracked it like an egg. Maybe a man's heart is capable of powerful things." Yet when it comes to Clay and Ellie, his fondness for his wife is clarified as having been simply companionship, not at all a deep love like Ellie and Clay have. Huh.

At times I wondered why the main protagonists didn't fear the obvious things that would doom them: loss of the bees (which allowed their garden to grow) to a storm, or sheep to a mishap or illness, or chickens to either of the above. Clay and Ellie's respective "should I, shouldn't I?" internal warring about potential intimacy felt like a luxury--and, ultimately, crises do occur for the couple, who must adjust and face difficult circumstances. The eventual romance and passion were lovely and all-encompassing for the characters.

I felt repeatedly surprised that Ellie didn't miss more creature comforts; she mentions only a few aspects of modern life that she wishes for. I also expected at least a few brief grumpy periods in which the two characters bristle at having only each other for company, conversation, entertainment, and stimulation.

Because Clay and Ellie and their creatures don't age, they witness a fast-forwarding of climate change. It's a powerful element in the book in that it affects their trajectory around the globe and their landing options and conditions, yet it takes up relatively little page time. Ellie makes some seemingly flippant comments about the hypothetical rejection of everyday life, and it's unclear what alternative she imagines for others; as far as we know, only two people in the world have been able to escape to a timeless island: "I would tell them to burn it all down. So they can build something new. I wasn't the only one dying back there on the mainland. We all were; our lives poisoned by the very things we thought would save us." Earnshaw largely seems to leave this directive and the environment's bleak developments for the reader to contextualize.

I was intrigued by the early story, willing to put aside any temporary impatience about the pacing of the middle, then felt that the ending was somewhat abrupt--yet its resolutions were somewhat satisfying.

I read a prepublication edition of this novel courtesy of NetGalley and Atria Books.

More Books to Explore

Shea Ernshaw is also the author of The Wicked Deep, A History of Wild Places, Winterwood, and other titles.

Check out these links for Bossy books that play with time, books about island life, and books with Scottish settings.