The Oceanography of the Moon

After the untimely deaths of her aunt and mother, young Riley Mays moved from Chicago to her cousins' Wisconsin farm, where she found solace in caring for her extraordinary adoptive brother, exploring the surrounding wild nature, and gazing at the mystical moon — a private refuge from her most painful memories. Ten years later, now twenty-one, Riley feels too confined by the protective walls she's built around herself.

When a stranger enters her family's remote world, Riley senses something he's hiding — a desire to escape that she understands well. Suffering from writer's block, bestselling novelist Vaughn Orr has taken to the country roads when he happens upon the accommodating, if somewhat unusual, Mays family. He's soon captivated by their eccentricities, and especially by Riley and her quiet tenacity. Riley and Vaughn get to know each other, and it becomes clear both are keeping secrets so heavy neither can fully move forward with their lives — the novel traces their shared path toward healing and facing the past.