I’m going to be honest right up front. I recognize that The Last True Poets of the Sea was not written with me in mind. I am not the target audience. Julia Drake’s debut novel is about a teenage girl’s summer in Maine where – on an unexpected quest to uncover (and discover) the truth about her family’s history – she comes to terms with her own mistakes, her brother’s attempted suicide, her family’s dysfunction, and her own heart. It’s also the story of young queer love.

Even though I’m sure Drake didn’t have me (a 40-something cishet dad) in mind when she wrote the book, The Last True Poets of the Sea nevertheless found its way into my heart and warmed my entire soul. After I finished the book, I closed it, stared at the cover, and hugged it close.

I hugged the book! Who even am I?

The Last True Poets of the Sea (out now from Hyperion) is at once gorgeous, romantic, insightful, tender, and hilarious. It’s also bittersweetly nostalgic (and more than a bit terrifying for those of us with kids about to become teenagers). I literally couldn’t put it down.

The whole point is the adventure… The last true poets of the sea… People for whom discovery–like, the concept of the journey–is the treasure itself.

Sixteen-year-old Violet Larkin finds herself at the tail end of her so-called Year of Wild: a time when she threw caution to the wind and embraced all the danger, debauchery, and “good times” New York City could offer up. Which happened to be a lot. And nothing could stop her.

Until something did. Until her brother Sam tried to kill himself, and everything came crashing down around her. But even that didn’t quite do it. It wasn’t until she was caught with an older man in the hospital where her brother was being treated that the proverbial camel’s back broke.

It’s only then, when Violet is sent to spend the summer with her uncle in Lyric, Maine, that she has enough clarity to look at herself and wonder, “Who have I become?” And it’s precisely this (mostly unasked) theoretical question that pushes her forward and helps define her time in Lyric.

Lyric is her family’s ancestral home. Not only did she and Sam spend their younger summers there, but the town folklore is centered on their great-great-great-grandmother – the sole survivor of a shipwreck (the Lyric) that has never been discovered.

But when Violet finds a group of friends (who turn into the first real friends she’s ever had) – but especially Liv Stone, a self-proclaimed amateur local historian who’s obsessed with finding the Lyric – she’s forced to analyze the person she’s becoming and find a way to make amends with her past as she continues forward.

It’d be unfair to simply call The Last True Poets of the Sea a “coming-of-age story.” Though it may tick many of the cliched boxes, Drake’s novel is so much more. This is a story about human connections, including (and maybe especially?) those that seem entirely too messy to deal with. With family, with friends, with those we love, and with ourselves.

Violet and Sam’s relationship (and Vi’s love for her brother) is at the core of the story, and that strained sibling connection – between two teenagers battling very different inner demons – is what sets the book apart.

Most of their relationship is seen through Vi’s tumultuous inner monologue, which is full of remorse and uncertainty. And when Sam finally appears toward the end of the book, their relationship is ironically both threadbare and indestructible. Far too few books explore the unpredictability of brother-sister dynamics, especially in those wild years when we develop and become fully formed humans, but Drake masterfully wades through those particular waves.

Maybe there is no right thing. Maybe there are just things, plural, and you have to try them all.

Vi and Liv’s blossoming feelings for each other is another critical relationship in a book already spilling over with characters finding and/or redefining themselves. Theirs is the somewhat classic friendship turned “What are we?” turned lovers. With a whole lot of introspection and self-discovery along the way.

But it’s Vi’s feelings for Liv – her first case of genuine emotional (not just carnal) connection – that really help her move beyond the erratic Year of Wild and become a whole person again. A person capable of reclaiming a relationship with her brother, of reconciling with her parents, and of surviving the hurricane that is adolescence.

The Last True Poets of the Sea is all the more remarkable since it’s Julia Drake’s debut novel. She’s set the bar incredibly high for herself, and I for one will be watching her career with great interest.

Recommended in every conceivable way.