About this book
I wrote Fingerprints In The Water because the ocean is too often treated as something distant, even by those of us whose lives depend on it. We see the images of plastic-covered beaches, tangled whales, dead birds, and floating garbage patches, but we are taught to experience them as separate headlines. I wanted to bring that damage closer. Not as a lecture, but as a story where the ocean is alive, wounded, remembering, and still reaching out.
At the heart of this book is Kai Chen, a fifteen-year-old boy in Cape Breton who feels caught between belonging and leaving, between the life his family built from the sea and the future he imagines somewhere else. Through Kai’s bond with Uranus, the ancient dragon of the ocean, the book explores pollution, ghost gear, microplastics, marine rescue, community responsibility, and the quiet ways young people begin to understand that the world they are inheriting has already been changed for them.
The research behind the story comes from the real conditions facing the oceans: plastic waste that never truly disappears, fishing gear that keeps killing long after it is lost, contaminants that move through currents and food chains, and the growing recognition that environmental harm is never isolated. But I also wanted to root the story in human and cultural connection — family, migration, Indigenous knowledge, local fishing communities, youth activism, and the complicated relationship between earning a living from the sea and protecting it.
What I hope readers take away is not despair, but responsibility. The ocean is not simply a setting, a resource, or a place to send what we do not want to see. It is part of the living system that makes us possible. Fingerprints In The Water is written for young readers, educators, librarians, and anyone who believes stories can help us feel what facts alone sometimes cannot: that the damage we leave behind still carries our shape, and that choosing differently is still within our hands.
