GOLD: 2024 INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER BOOK AWARDS (IPPYS), BEST FICTION, AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND-AOTEAROA/PACIFIC RIM

GOLD: 2025 NAUTILUS BOOK AWARDS YA 13 - 19+ READERS

SILVER: 2024 READER'S FAVORITE BOOK AWARD FOR LITERARY FICTION

SEMI-FINALIST 2024 THE BOOKLIFE PRIZE

WINNER: 4TH ANNUAL ZIBBY AWARDS (i) BEST BOOK FOR BEST FRIEND & (ii) BEST BOOK FOR ANIMAL LOVER

WINNER: BEDSIDE READING Winter 2025 BEST COVER AWARD, GENERAL FICTION

FINALIST: 2025 NEXT GENERATION BOOK AWARDS, BEST OVERALL DESIGN, PRINT BOOK

From Jenni Ogden, author of multiple-award-winning A Drop in the Ocean, comes another evocative story of friendship, coral reefs, and marine conservation for book-club readers.

It is the late 1970s and teenagers Gaia and her brother Bron live with their parents on their isolated property on Western Australia's Coral Coast. Intensively trained for a career as a professional ballet dancer by her mother, once a Principal Dancer in the American Ballet Theatre, Gaia also loves snorkeling over the coral reef that borders their small market garden. Then comes a day that changes her life forever: she discovers a rare pair of dramatically colored seadragons, their courtship dance over the coral spellbinding, and that night she loses her entire family and her dancing dream. Two years later she returns to the abandoned property, determined to live off the land. For years her only friends are the wild animals of the bush and reef, and Mary and Eddie, an Aboriginal couple who work for the racist farmer on the neighboring property — until one morning Jarrah, Mary's 11-year-old orphaned nephew, is entranced when he sees Gaia dancing on the beach. As an unlikely friendship between these two lonely and scarred people deepens, they discover that when you lose everything the only way to survive is to open your heart.