The Sea of Tranquility by Katja Millay

Title: The Sea of Tranquility
Author: Katja Millay
Publisher: Self-published
Release date: September 5th 2012
Reading level: Ages 18 and up

Rating: 4.5/5

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I live in a world without magic or miracles. A place where there are no clairvoyants or shapeshifters, no angels or superhuman boys to save you. A place where people die and music disintegrates and things suck. I am pressed so hard against the earth by the weight of reality that some days I wonder how I am still able to lift my feet to walk.

Former piano prodigy Nastya Kashnikov wants two things: to get through high school without anyone learning about her past and to make the boy who took everything from her—her identity, her spirit, her will to live—pay.

Josh Bennett’s story is no secret: every person he loves has been taken from his life until, at seventeen years old, there is no one left. Now all he wants is be left alone and people allow it because when your name is synonymous with death, everyone tends to give you your space.

Everyone except Nastya, the mysterious new girl at school who starts showing up and won’t go away until she’s insinuated herself into every aspect of his life. But the more he gets to know her, the more of an enigma she becomes. As their relationship intensifies and the unanswered questions begin to pile up, he starts to wonder if he will ever learn the secrets she’s been hiding—or if he even wants to.

The Sea of Tranquility is a rich, intense, and brilliantly imagined story about a lonely boy, an emotionally fragile girl, and the miracle of second chances.

Lately I've been reading a lot of  New Adult ebooks and a friend recommended me this book, because I was torn between this and another book. So I decided to read this first and just reading the prologue...it hooked me.

I hate my left hand. I hate to look at it. I hate it when it stutters and trembles and reminds me that my identity is gone. But I look at it anyway; because it also reminds me that I’m going to find the boy who took everything from me. I’m going to kill the boy who killed me, and when I kill him, I’m going to do it with my left hand.

The Sea of Tranquility is an intense, poignant, heartbreaking and complex story, where the story unfolds slowly and there is no instant-love or love at first sight, and we get to know the characters gradually.

The story is told from the point of view of Josh and Nastya, switching between them; Nastya is a seventeen year-old and because of something that happened to her a couple of years ago, she´s bitter, angry, and traumatized girl that doesn´t want to be loved and she doesn´t speak by choice, she doesn´t even write messages because she feels that's cheating. Meanwhile Josh is a seventeen year-old boy whom everyone he ever loved have died, so the last thing he wants is to love someone else, he thinks that now that his grandfather (whom is sick and dying), the last member of his family alive, it will all be over, he will not lose another loved one, because he is determined not to love anyone else. So when these two know each other and begin to spend time together the last thing they want is to become attached to each other, but gradually they become dependent on each other.

Overall, I really loved this book, mainly because the romance is slow, the characters are easy to love and it has a happy ending. I can not say it's a pretty story, because is a tragic and beautifully told story. This is a book worth reading.

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