The death of a child is one of the biggest blows a marriage can experience. Often that blow is more than the couple can survive. This is exactly the way Guy and Judy's marriage came to an end. Their only daughter, Freya, is killed in a freak accident. Within months, their marriage is over, leaving Guy unsettled and without purpose. He buys a Dutch barge and sets off toward the North Sea. At night, he keeps a diary, not of his days on the barge, but of the life he and his family would have had were it not for Freya's death. He had no cause to consider the meaning of this self-deception until he encounters Marta and her grown daughter Rhona in the estuary near some of his best memories of his early relationship with Judy. These women come into his life with their own grief. What purpose will Guy have in their lives? What purpose will they have in his?

Guy is one depressed man. In short order he loses his beloved five year old daughter and then the wife he adored. Freya was his smile and Judy was the music of his life. I could understand how lost he was and how tempting it must have been to start writing a diary of the life he lost. He wrote to keep Freya alive some way, but even in this made up existence, the pain is never far away. The longer he keeps the journal of their trip across the United States, the more reality seeps in. I got to the point that I wanted Marta or Rhona or even a fish from the sea to follow Cher's lead from Moonstruck and tell Guy to "Snap out of it!" I wondered if he couldn't see that his compulsion to write about Freya and Judy was hurting, not helping him. Over time, it gets hard to dwell in his murky darkness.

It's difficult to spend so much time in the head of a depressed person. If it must be done, John Lee might as well be your tour guide. Last summer I spent several weeks with John Lee while reading Pillars of the Earth. I loved his narration and he made that tome move at a brisk and melodic pace. As soon as Sea Change began, I instantly felt comfortable. It was if he'd been waiting on me to have him tell me another story. I did have to look up Freya's name shortly after getting started. It sounded to me like her name was "Frayer." I knew (hoped actually) that couldn't possibly be her name. Once I looked it up, I heard it perfectly clearly. John Lee's narration was the highlight of Sea Change for me.

Reading Sea Change required a good deal of concentration and I wasn't convinced it would pay off in the end. I grew more hopeful as additional details about his actual life with Judy were brought to life and started to round everything out. It is not fun or fulfilling being or living with a depressed person. As someone who has found her own way to the "other side," I wanted him to feel something. I wanted him to come to terms with everything he'd lost instead of burying himself in his diary. I wanted to see him grow more content or angry. I was happy when he found his storm. The ending was not at all what I was expecting and it felt appropriate and worthwhile. When picking up this novel, be prepared for a journey inside the heart of a desperately lonely and heartsick man. ( )

A stunning novel, one that provokes a string of adjectives to describe the experience it brings to the reader: haunting, eerie, poignant, memorable, distressing.

Guy watches as his four year old daughter is killed....this happens at the very beginning of the book, and right there, I was seriously tempted to abandon further reading. I don't like violence to children, but this one is written in such a dreamlike way that I was trying to figure out what was really happening.

After that 1st short chapter, we are suddenly catapulted to a scene that is five years later, and Guy is alone on a barge floating in tidal coastal waters near the North Sea. He spends his time writing a diary of what he thought his life with his family would have been. This surreal narration is interspersed with his introspection as his navigates the waters and spends his lonely hours filling time with music, reading, and the essentials of daily life.

He meets fellow marine nomads, an older woman and her barely adult daughter. As he shares a few days with them, he begins to recover from his previous loss, and we get fleshed out details of what else happened to him at the beginning of the story.

This story is not a rip-snorting adventure story, nor a fast paced narrative. It floats along at about the same pace as his daily life on the barge. Simply put, in spite of his dreams to the contrary, life goes on, inexorably drawing him to the sea. The story culminates in a splendid maritime storm scene that even non-sailors can appreciate, with a trance like and somewhat bizarre ending that will satisfy some readers and leave others scratching their heads.

It is a splendid piece of writing. Page's prose is exquisitely evocative, and produces images that allow readers who have never been to sea, or to the North Sea area of the world, to experience the sights, sounds, smells, swells and sensations of a "sea change." ( )

I got pulled into this book by its beautiful, descriptive language. The land, the water, the boat were characters that participated in the plot in very real ways. And the world "real" means a lot here, because the main character, Guy, is at best half real. He lives on an old barge, trolling around the North Sea's coast, lost in more ways than one. Five years prior a terrible fluke accident had occurred and his young daughter was killed. His marriage did not survive long after her death. At least in the real world. But every night Guy sits in his boat and writes a diary of what could have/should have been. It is far more of his life than the physical world is. Until a chance encounter with another woman and her daughter gives him a glimpse of a possible connection to and future in the real world. The question is if that glimpse has come in time. This is a quiet, layered book that leaves you pondering what happens in it long after the last page is turned. ( )