I’m not sure what I just read. But I liked it. Jenn and Timmy were best friends in the way only kids who meet over the summer can be. Their weirds match. They find a strange creature and release it back to the ocean. That bonds you. It’s practically instant.

And then in another instance, Timmy is gone. Assumed drowned. Just disappeared. For a few decades. He returns, still 1o, with the strange creature and its friends. And something else. Then everything goes upside down.

The feel of the entire book brought me back to 80s movies where kids understood all of the things most adults didn’t and were left to save us all. Nostalgia aside, the relationship between Jenn and Timmy, both as children and with one as an adult was still magical. Your best friend is your best friend.

My favorite, though, must have been grandma. The few adults who would listen went forward with everything they had. The time travel stuff got pretty messy. But it always does. And if you are feeling twisted around by what I just wrote, you are ready to read this one.

I got this book as an ARC from Netgalley. The book starts us off with Jenni, a ten year old girl who lives on Pearle Island with her mom who is always working to be able to able to maintain their bills. Jenni fills her days with trips to the beach where she meets Timmy, a boy in town for the summer. But a tragedy cuts their adventures short.

Fast forward 30 years and Jenn is now a very famous author with her adventure series Philipia Bay. But her personal life is falling apart as her husband is leaving her and her kids seem disinterested. She decides to take her kids for a summer at her childhood town of Pearle Island only for things to take a very weird turn.

To me, this book did too much and it didn't always fit together. I'm still having trouble understanding how an author would be so busy always writing to never see her family as that's one of those jobs you can do a little more flexibly. She's also a successful author with tons of money so surely her deadlines could wait a little bit.

The mix of a contemporary story of divorce and family seems at odds with the sea monster aspect of it. You also have the kids always talking about Pokemon which killed me because sometimes the Pokemon were real (like Eevee and Pikachu) but mostly she made up Pokemon names. I felt like she should have just committed to it or has it be completely made up. That really took me out of the story.

The climax of the story is definitely interesting but the resolution seemed a little too easy for how intense the conflict got. It all felt much too sudden.

Thank you Netgalley for the early arc of Here Beside the Rising Tide. I really wanted to read this one and I'm so glad I was able to. I would highly recommend reading this as well. It's a great story and should be shared. I rated this 4.5 stars.

I tried three times to read this book by a new to me author and could just not get into it! What sounded interesting turned out to be a rambling, weird, just not for me story. Sadly I DNF'd after less than halfway through. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early digital copy in exchange for my honest thoughts.

DNF @28%

I'm so disappointed that I didn't like this. Everything about it was just so annoying and ridiculous. I really didn't like the main character.

Here Beside the Rising Tide is an unusual book. It begins as the story of a steamy romance writer’s own divorce. It adds a bit of romance and a whole lot of fantasy. Not sexual fantasy…but Pokémon fantasy? What if renamed Pokémon characters were recruited to fight off a real sea monster trying to destroy the world? Oh, and don’t forget the ten-year-old boy who disappeared into the sea decades ago only to return unchanged decades later. WTF?

I like fantasy but this book goes a bit too far into the deep end for me. This is coming from someone obsessed enough with playing Pokémon Go that I actually walked outside (and not just to my car) for a year after it came out. But Here Beside the Rising Tide pushes my love for animalistic fantasy friends to the breaking point.

This book could be the perfect choice for former (and current—no judgment here) Pokémon card and old school “color” and “gem” video game fans. For others, it will take a lot of imagination, and a very active ability to suspend disbelief, to enjoy this unique book. 3 stars.

Thanks to NetGalley and Hyperion Avenue for providing me with an advanced review copy.

Maybe 2.5 stars rounded up. There is A LOT going on in this story, it's certainly a mash up of genres. There's some contemporary fiction, some action and romance, and weirdly maybe a Pokemon meets Power Rangers vibe. Mostly it's a goofy fun time, but sometimes it did feel like the goofy fun time was going on a little too long. I did find the main character Jenn relatable. I am no stranger to existential crises and also tend to choose avoidance, but after a while even I was like "you gotta put down the wine, feed your kids something other than gummy worms, and deal with it!" I do really like how the story captures the feeling that everything is happening at once. Jenn is dealing with impending divorce, grieving her mother, feeling stagnant professionally, and then an epic challenge like an attacking sea monster tops it all off. The return of Timmy, the squidoodles, the sea monster battle, the travel across the time/space continuum is all light-hearted, fun, absurdity. But it's also during the absurdity that Jenn is processing and making breakthroughs. Overall, it's a good story, it's just that occasionally it drug and my attention wandered. Thanks to NetGalley and Hyperion Avenue for the DRC in exchange for an honest review.

A woman whose life has spun out of control takes a spontaneous vacation with her kids. When they get stuck because of sea monsters and a missing-persons mystery, the woman realizes she may need to brace herself for losing control on a whole different level. Emily Jane returns with her second novel that loses steam in Here Beside the Rising Tide.

Jenn Lanaro is fed up. Her husband, Chuck, graciously agreed to give up his job as a car salesman and stay at home when the kids came along, and at the time it was a good idea. Jenn’s been raking in serious money since her action-romance book series took off, and Chuck has always been great with the kids. On paper no woman could ask for more than a man who supports her creative dreams.

But everything is far from rosy. Chuck has recently moved to a condo and asked for a divorce. He says he and Jenn haven’t been connecting lately, and Jenn is getting sick of hearing about the self-help thought leader who is Chuck’s new mentor. Who has time to connect when she has to keep brainstorming new ideas for new books and delivering on them to her insatiable audience?

On a day when Chuck says taking the kids back to his place, Jenn decides she has to try to win back her children’s affection. Without warning anyone, including herself, she packs up her precocious tweens and starts driving from Ohio to the North Carolina coast. There’s only one place in the world where Jenn knows everything will be right again: Pearl Island.

Growing up on Pearl Island was mostly an idyllic experience. It’s also where she met her best friend, Timmy Laruso, the year Jenn turned 10. Jenn and Timmy were inseparable that summer he and his family came to stay on Pearl Island, and they had amazing kid adventures together. Until Timmy went swimming in the ocean one day and never came back.

Losing Timmy was one of the most difficult experiences of Jenn’s life; so was her mother’s death from cancer. But even those two tragedies can’t take the sheen off Pearl Island, and Jenn can’t wait to share her childhood with her kids. Once she can get them to look up from their screens, that is.

Then something happens that gets everyone’s attention: Timmy emerges from the ocean as his 10-year-old self. He says he’s back to save the world, and he needs Jenn’s help to do it. Jenn debates reporting this found child to the police—there’s no way he could actually be Timmy, right?—but the appearance of bizarre sea creatures makes her second-guess herself. Then comes the real monster, and Jenn starts questioning the things she thought she knew about herself best.

Author Emily Jane’s second novel is just as quirky as her first, and the two share similarities. Jane’s child characters are full of funny one-liners and earned wisdom. The plots of both books veer into completely unexpected places that, within their respective story worlds, make sense. Also, at the heart of both novels are protagonists who want nothing more than to go back to the safety, security, and love that is home.

Yet unlike the tight, crisp plot of On Earth As It Is on Television, Here Beside the Rising Tide flounders once Jenn arrives in Pearl Island. Her gusto and determination to take charge crumble the minute her feet hit the sand, and all of Jenn’s sections in the middle of the book show her wringing her hands; sometimes literally. Nowhere is this more painfully obvious than when the battle with the sea monster begins. The kids become the real stars of the novel who act like protagonists, and Jenn comes off as a secondary or even tertiary character along for the ride.

The novel includes from Jenn’s books as well as from the self-help material Chuck reads, and on the surface it seems like these texts are supposed to be in conversation with one another to enrich the plot. In reality, the excerpts feel extraneous. Some of them are entertaining, but they don’t do much for the overarching story. Random chapters from other characters feel like wasted opportunities, because they’re so interesting on their own that some readers may feel frustrated about not getting more from them.

Emily Jane’s ability to create three-dimensional characters saves the book from being a complete washout, however, and the premise is off-the-wall fun. Those who enjoyed Jane’s first book will definitely want to check this one. Others new to her work may want to read her first book instead.

Romance author Jenn decides to break away from the chaos of her life - book deadlines and dealing with her soon-to-be ex-husband - and take her kids on a summer vacation to Pearl Island. However, Pearl Island also holds some emotional history for Jenn because it is where she grew up. Since her mother's passing, Jenn has rarely been back, plus Pearl Island also comes with the unresolved trauma of Jenn's best friend's disappearance thirty years ago. As with many people, when life gets tough you just want to run home and bury your head in the sand - as the case may be.

Almost immediately after they arrive, strange things begin to happen, least of which is the return of Jenn's best friend - still aged 10 from when he disappeared. But he comes with a message, something is out in the water. This rather ominous declaration is further corroborated by other boaters, swimmers, paddle-boarders who have run into trouble....or those that just haven't come back. When the island becomes shut off from the mainland, Jenn will need to reconcile with events in her past to save her family in the present.

This book kind of came out of nowhere for me. I was not expecting it to be what it turned out to be which is this, at times, heartbreaking look at loss in many forms - loss of a parent, loss of a friend, loss of the life you pictured for yourself - while looking back and wondering how you ended up in your current present.

Coupled with all of that we have sea monsters, and squid creatures, and boys who disappeared thirty years ago. It also becomes about finding yourself again. Maybe not who you used to be but who you decide to be going forward.

It takes Jenn the majority of the book to even start to get things figured out, and until then it feels a bit chaotic, but not to the point where it was too much. For all that, it is a slower build until we get to the huge conflict of the sea monster which is kind of this ominous looming presence in the background. At times the road to that confrontation seemed to drag on a little too slowly, and honestly as I write this review and I'm thinking back to the story, I struggle to pinpoint exact facts about what goes down (without having to actually reopen the book and look). Moreso, it's the feeling that I remember of people coming together to solve a threat. No one is thinking about anything else beyond how we can survive. So then there's that added layer of community thrown in there.

I appreciate the novelty of the story. As something completely unexpected yet with hints of the familiar. This is the first book I've read by Emily Jane, but I'm eager to jump into another thoughtful story enshrouded in a, at times, wacky adventure.

Happy Pub Week to this whimsical, wacky book! Thanks so much to Hyperion Avenue and NetGalley for the advance copy.

“Life was a losing battle, really. Everything else out there in the vast beyond was so lifeless and empty. Mostly, a person had to look away. But there came a moment, or many moments, when a person had to extract their proverbial head from the sand and set aside their screens and remove their headphones and stand witness.”

When she was 10, Jenni and her new best friend Timmy were having an incredible summer on Pearl Island. They spent countless hours on the beach and in the water, setting off fireworks, and simply enjoying the freedom of not having any responsibility. They even helped a strange sea creature make its way back to the ocean. But suddenly, Timmy disappeared one day when they were in the water, and no one knew what happened.

Now, at 40, Jenn is the bestselling author of a smutty romance/action series. She’s also in the midst of a divorce from her self-help-book-addicted husband, with their two children caught in the crossfire. Her next book is overdue and she needs to escape, so she rents a beach house on Pearl Island for the summer, hoping she can keep her soon-to-be-ex at bay.

One night a familiar-looking boy comes out of the water. He says his name is Timmy, and he needs Jenn’s help to save the world. And things get totally crazy: shark attacks, sea monsters, even the return of the adorable sea creatures from their youth. At the same time, Jenn is attracted to a sexy contractor while trying to finish her books.

This is part sci-fi, part coming of age novel. It’s definitely all over the place, but it has such an enormous heart. I felt like it ran a bit longer than it needed to—there were lots of excerpts from Jenni's books and her husband’s self-help books that I could’ve done without. But Emily Jane drew me in with her storytelling for sure.

This was such a fun, quirky read about a romance author Jean Lanardo who is in the middle of a custody battle and dealing with a looming deadline decides to return to her childhood home on Pearl Island. When a boy wanders out of the ocean claiming to be her childhood best friend and gelatinous creatures keep appearing in the surf she knows Jeans life is upturned in the best way possible.

This was such a fun, imaginative read that I truly enjoyed. Thank you to Netgalley and to the publishers for allowing me to read this advanced copy

A woman who lost a friend in the ocean when they were ten years old is struggling with her life as an adult, wife, mother, and writer. Though she's written a best-selling women's action/mystery/spy novel series, she finds it formulaic and uninspiring, unmotivated to edit her latest novel.
Her marriage has been suffering for years, and now her stay at home dad of a husband is divorcing her. Her kids are addicted to Pokémon and screen time and have already begun pitting their parents against each other. So Jenn has decided to take her kids on an impromptu beach vacation to decide what to do with her mother's old house, and to try to bond with her children. But it's on the same beach where she grew up, and where Timmy disappeared 30 years ago. And has just reappeared. With a mission to save the world, though he's not sure how or from what. Then strange things begin happening, like creatures in the sea, a tsunami hits the carnival, and they find a strange sea creature from the ocean who grows when it's fed candy.

Jenn struggles, insecurities, and complaints as a mother/writer/wife are a bit redundant and excessive, repeated again and again over the first 35% of the book, and comprise most of her inner monologue during this section. Rising action takes a bit of time to finally begin as well. But anyone who has nostalgia for childhoods at the beach or candy on the boardwalk, and is also into a bit of sea monster fantasy, should appreciate this book.

I was given an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review from Net Galley. All opinions expressed are solely mine and do not reflect the publisher, author, or affiliates.

This book was an interesting read, it promised to be sea beach and carnival vibes. However, I found that I was largely uninterested in what was going on, the writing style was hard for myself to get into and I ended up not finishing the book, as I was fearful that it was going to put me into a slump.

Thanks to netgalley & the publisher for my early e-arc copy.

What a unique, clever, page-turning, strange, romantic, sci-fi, mystery. I couldn't put this book down and I also wasn't sure I liked any of the characters. Usually liking a character is important to me, but it wasn't in this book. I was fascinated by where the story was going. This is a creative blend of story types -- I'm not sure I've read anything like it? It has a mystery, a mom struggling, a sea monster and more. I'll be thinking about this one for awhile!

"Life was a losing battle, really. Everything else out there in the vast beyond was so lifeless and empty. Mostly, a person had to look away. But there came a moment, or many moments, when a person had to extract their proverbial head from the sand and set aside their screens and remove their headphones and stand witness."

"But life is absurd. We have to revel in the absurdity."

What a heartwarming, life-affirming book!

Did I think I would love a book about sea monsters? Not really, but I loved Emily Jane's previous book about space alien cats and thought this one would appeal as well and I was correct.

Jenn is a best selling romance author and mother of two young children, Evie (10) and Mason (7). She and her husband are separated and heading for divorce. Thirty years ago, as a child, Jenn met a boy named Timmy one summer when he was vacationing on the island where she lived. They rescued a funny sea creature and shortly thereafter, Timmy disappears while they are swimming in the ocean and is presumed drowned. At a crossroads in her life, Jenn packs up the children and takes them to the island in order to clean out her late mother's house. But who should appear in the ocean but Timmy, still ten years old and with some interesting tales to tell.

It's difficult to capture what this book is about in a paragraph. Suffice it to say, it's both magical realism and fantasy. A coming of age novel and a midlife novel. It explores serious topics in a very silly way. You have to be willing to go with the silliness and not take everything too literally or too seriously.

There are a couple of things I thought could have been condensed or eliminated, mainly there are too man excerpts from Jenn's romance novels and from her ex's weird self help books. I didn't think they added much to further the plot along.

Overall, I felt like this book was filled with adventure, humor, and made me think about life and all of its nuances. If you like a bit of wacky science fiction with time traveling sea monsters, you'll definitely delight in this novel.

Come on in. Come on, little humans. The water's fine.

With the deadline for her latest book fast approaching, and her soon-to-be-ex-husband clamoring for custody of the young ‘uns, popular romance author Jenn Lanaro snatches the kiddos and heads for the beach – her childhood home of Pearl Island, to be precise. Though she’s never forgotten that weird incident thirty years ago when her new best friend disappeared beneath the waves, it happened a long time ago, and right now she needs to unwind with her children while dreaming up new scenarios for her fictional heroine. What she doesn’t need is another child . . . a boy who wanders out of the ocean claiming to be her best bud from three decades ago.

And, if that’s not weird enough, strange little morphing, gelatinous creatures keep appearing in the surf. The kids have named them “squidoodles” or “squidnox” and are really hoping to keep one as a pet. The odd critters love nothing more than to dine on gummy candy, and cookies. And, as it turns out, they may just be the key to preventing Tentageddon.

That’s right. I said . . . Tentageddon.

You’re just gonna have to read it to find out.

This is another fantastical tale by Emily Jane. It’s delightful, and not just because junk food saves the day. As in her first book, On Earth as It Is on Television, she peoples her novel with warm, lovable characters, and children I wouldn't want to own, but whose antics I greatly enjoy.

‘Twas a fun, imaginative romp that I hated to see end.

HERE BESIDE THE RISING TIDE by Emily Jane had so much to recommend it: best-selling writer returns to the beach of her childhood summers only to be immersed in mystery, fantasy, impossibility of a dead childhood friend returning from the sea to save the world. However, somehow, the premise intrigued, the writing drew me in, but the story failed to hold me. It was definitely the genre bender of a story about kids and the adults they become and what happens when you are drawn into saving the world from aliens. It was definitely well-written, particularly the early section about young kids who find the sea creature and rescue it, liking it but not knowing why. The sense of place is solid, bringing me back to my own seaside vacations. However, the preposterous, particularly in the final third of the book, wound up spewing me out of the story. All in all, I'm glad I read it, but not sure I'd recommend it. I received a copy of this book and these opinions are my own, unbiased thoughts.

This was a fun ride, but did get a bit tedious at times. Jenni is a well-known romance author, famous for her Philipia Bay action-romance series, which is pretty much, as she calls it 'action smut'. The book has its regular plot, interspersed with chapters of her next installment of the series. As you may guess, there are some parallels. Each cover has a Fabio-esque model on the cover in various states of undress. Jenni is having marital issues with her husband Chuck, who has been a stay at home dad to their 2 children. To escape the impending divorce and joint custody bargaining, she takes the kids and escapes to Pearl Island, her childhood home, to clean out the family cottage after her mothers death.

Upon arriving, she runs into her childhood friend, who died 30 years ago, and that's when things get weird. Soon 2 different types of sea monsters are battling it out, and she and the kids befriend a local hot contractor to help save the world.

A fun premise for sure, but the ongoing battle scences took up 1/3 of the book, so I think some serious editing could have occurred. There's great character development here and you are rooting for Jenni and the contractor to make it work and save the world, so there's that. It's campy and fun and would make a hilarious movie.

Thank you netgalley for the opportunity to read this book! Here Beside the Rising Tide by Emily Jane was a quirky, interesting read. I enjoyed the characters and some of the sci fi aspects of the story, but overall it felt too long. I wasn’t invested enough in Jenn’s career as an author to read so many excerpts from her books. Overall, the book was fine and I know many readers who will love it!

Thank you Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book. The opinions written are completely honest and my own.

Although the story was a fun and odd, if was not for me.

The writing was very detailed and at times mind bending. I think this is a wonderful book for lover of Sci Fi, but not my cup tea. There is a lot going on and my brain zoned out a lot