Julia Drake’s remarkable debut contemporary YA novel, THE LAST
TRUE POETS OF THE SEA, is the story of a wry teenager’s summer of
discovery: of herself, of her family and its history—and perhaps, even,
of a long-missing shipwreck believed to have brought her family to
coastal Maine generations ago.
Following her brother’s hospitalization, sixteen-year-old Violet Larkin
is exiled for the summer to her uncle’s house in Lyric, Maine—the same
town her great-great-great grandmother founded many years ago after
surviving a shipwreck. Wracked with guilt over her apparent inability to
be a supportive sister (and over her recent history of personal
misdeeds), Violet shaves her head and tries to lose herself in her
summer job: scrubbing tanks at the local aquarium.
There, Violet meets Orion Lewis, an ace trumpeter and burgeoning boat
builder, and his friend Liv Stone, an amateur wreck hunter with a
particular interest in Violet’s ancestors. Together, they embark on a
mission to uncover the wreck of the Lyric, the sunken ship that first
brought Violet’s family to this town. But if Violet is going to uncover
the true history of her family, she’s going to have to first be willing to
rewrite her own story and redefine her relationship to her friends, her
family, her past, her future—and most important of all, herself.