Recently, I was having coffee with a new friend when she insisted that I read a book she had recently finished. She said, “I need you to tell me what to think!” What a request, eh? I asked for the title of the book, and she couldn’t remember, though after a long Google, she still couldn’t find the title. It was “something with sea monsters and Pokémon.” Okie doke. Later, my friend and I met up again, and she thrust the book into my hands — she’d got it at a book exchange and it was on her shelves at home. I looked at the cover, which immediately gave me contemporary romance vibes for that somewhat cartoony style that is so popular right now.

Here Beside the Rising Tide by Emily Jane is like a romance novel without the romance. I’ve never read a book that uses the words shimmy and twirl so often. And yet, it was rather unforgettable. We start when our main character, Jenni, was a little girl. Her single mother works constantly, leaving Jenni alone most days in their small, beach-adjacent house. She goes to the beach by herself (in the days before constant parental supervision) and meets a new friend, a little boy named Timmy, who has both a huge curiosity drive and wealthy parents. After they discover a strange creature in the sand and place it back into the water, Timmy goes missing.

Jump ahead, and Jenn is a bestselling author tired of the character she created that launched a popular action-romance series. Her husband is leaving her after discovering the manosphere, and because he was the stay-at-home parent, he wants the kids. Like a totally normal person, Jenn packs up her kids and flees to her childhood home on the beach, leaving her spouse in the dark, to stay for the entire summer. Although most stories favor mothers, author Emily Jane makes it clear Jenn doesn’t know how to parent. She just wants to win her kids over by letting them do whatever they want and feeding them candy and mac and cheese all day: “She would never win Mother of the Year. But she would win points. The kids would use her benevolent sugar stands against Chuck. Mom lets us have cookies with lunch they would say, and her heart would be full.”

Unbelievably, Timmy reappears on the beach exactly as he was when Jenn was a child. He remembers Jenn but now feels she’s a boring adult when she won’t listen to his tale of traveling around with the sea creature they rescued and how he was brought back to save the day — because something bad is coming. Basically, Here Beside the Rising Tide progresses from little sea creatures turning into bigger sea creatures and having to do battle with a giant, black squid-like kraken thing. You’d never expect that, would you? Jenni’s kids and Timmy give all the creatures names like they’re Pokémon characters and insist on calling the president to summon the army.

What’s wild about Jane’s novel is that is so unexpected. We have a terrible mother who has kidnapped her own children. We have a caring father who has turned, out of desperation, to a toxic male author who writes about how to be a real man. There are unearthly, Lovecraftian sea creatures doing battle. Also, we get chapter excerpts from Jenni’s bestselling series, showing us how brave and sexy the protagonist is as a direct foil to Jenn. I found the novel easy to remember, even when I had to set it down midway and read a different title for an upcoming book club. Jane’s plot is highly imaginative, even if it is told through rom-com-like sentences. Everything is a bit twee, like my comment about the words “twirl” and “shimmy” cropping up so often you’d think humans were incapable of walking left foot-right foot at a normal gait. But in the end, I told my friend that I thought it was a crazy ride, that the mom was a terrible parent, that it didn’t make sense for a stay-at-home dad to turn to a toxic male author, and that at one point the sea creatures had a real Power Rangers moment, which I could appreciate as a kid from the 90s.