about her book

In a city whose name means “the end of things,” her new life begins. Summer stands outside arrivals at Tucumán Airport in Argentina, sixteen years old, waiting for a host family that never shows. When a girl her age offers refuge, shapeshifting into her world seems a better choice than returning to Alaska, where her hypersensitive body and edgeless self have always felt wrong.

Over the next fourteen years, she shapeshifts her way toward belonging — harvesting crabs and butchering hogs on a Honduran island, learning Patois and growing edges to survive in Jamaica’s dancehall world. In Kingston, she becomes the “catty” of the neighborhood DJ. Hard where she’d been soft. Fluent in other worlds, but a stranger in her own.

At twenty-two, she moves to Costa Rica and falls for Tigre, a magnetic Venezuelan surfer whose mother, a bruja, promises protection. Becoming “the girl of the Surf Ambassador,” she thinks she’s found belonging. But as she contorts herself to his world — his language, his culture, his desires, their marriage — he threatens to kill her. He tells her he’s not afraid of jail. The spirits that once protected them now bind her to him. If she doesn’t break free, she’ll lose herself completely.

FATHOM interrogates belonging, gender, privilege, and self-erasure across Latin America and the Caribbean while exploring intercultural adaptation as survival. Part personal narrative, part excavation of the cultures she moved through and unknowingly carried, it explores when shapeshifting becomes survival, when it becomes extraction, and when it becomes self-erasure.