Sea Glass

a personal book review of @Christina Rivera’s book, My Oceans

Tl;dr: Read

Christina Rivera (Author)

’s book, My Oceans.

Me reading My Oceans at the Indian Ocean.

(Listen if you like…)

I think you (

Christina Rivera (Author)

) will be heartened to hear My Oceans made it to the Indian Ocean. Knowing your globetrotting ways, perhaps this isn’t the first copy to see these waters but I reckon it’s the first on the Kenyan coast. Today I read it on the beach while my daughter, Nora, carefully dressed a humble sand castle – really just a small cupped mound of sand made with her hands and no buckets – with seaweed, dotting the arch above the door with six individual bulbous, gooey airpods (but actual pods of air, not headphones or earbuds or whatever) she had removed from the main stalk and Clara dripped sand onto her Jackson-Pollock-style “coral reef,” unconcerned about minute details like her sister. Meanwhile in My Oceans, your daughter Riva made altars of pink foam hearts and rocks secreted from her brother’s collection.

I sat thirty-some miles south of where I went tidepooling for hours in 2024 in what felt to me like a goosechase more than a treasure hunt. Nothing like my technicolor memories of miniature real-world aquariums teeming with life from tidepooling as a child. Clara and Nora saw only treasure – hermit crabs and clams and barnacles. They were thrilled when we found a single solitary starfish (I was missing the ‘made-a-difference-for-that-one’-parable beach pearled with their constellationed forms as far as the eye can see).

It was March then and the water was warm as a slightly cooled bathtub. The air was thick and sometimes hurt my lungs to breathe, filling them with hot moisture in a way entirely opposite from how the Colorado mountains suck the air straight from your lungs on a frigid ski tour or when shoveling your driveway or just getting the mail. Like a steam room with no door.

I spent each morning walking, carrying bags to pick up the renewable mountains of trash washed up with the night’s tides, listening to Braiding Sweetgrass and the Force for Nature podcast at 1.5 speed, trying to beat the heat and cram all-of-the-words into my brain and heart as I watched the big orange ball jump up from beyond where the ocean seemed to end. Or possibly infinity if it’s a place. I could have seen its ascent with my eyes closed, the temperature tracking its course above the horizon.

Anyhow, I have written just one book review of my own volition (previously only for an assignment in Miss Lavota’s English class) in all of my days. It came out of me because I was compelled by appreciation and awe over a decade ago by BK Loren’s stunning book of essays, Animal, Mineral, Radical. On Amazon of all places, I wrote:

“BK Loren knows how to use language. Whether rendering heart-wrenching accounts of her mother's battle with Parkinson's disease or recounting the efforts of her hodge-podge neighborhood coalition to save their open space in the face of incoming big box stores, Loren deftly weaves stories that affect her readers. It has been forever since a book actually made me cry and this one did so, and made me laugh, and think too--all good things. I bought this and Theft (BK’s other book) for holiday presents for everyone on my list.”

(The review is still there among Top Reviews from the United States and “one person found it helpful!).

How perfect to have my second review be for your breathtaking book, which played on my lungs like hot-humid coastal air and parched winter mountain air – at times drowning in an ocean of emotion and lyrical prose – but also like a breath of the sky right after the rain. (We’ll have to figure out which excerpt goes on Amazon because this is too long for anyone to read while scrolling on an e-commerce website and maybe also on Substack, though most of y’all know by now: brevity is not my thing).

I told my husband that My Oceans is hard. Heavy. Unrelenting wave after wave of stunning writing, breathtaking darkness, and gasps of hope.

Nora wanted wants to find shells. I’m not sure if it’s because of coral bleaching or ecological destruction or the season or something else, but there are almost none on this beach. You could walk for miles and find only cuttlefish backbone and seaweed evidence of ocean life.

Then I picked up a piece of waterlogged bamboo with dozens of little mollusks attached to it and showed it to Nora with excessive-relief-exuberance. Life! We watched their little feet, I think (I don’t know much about mollusks) pop in and out, testing the air in which they hovered now as I held up their home.

“I want to find empty shells to keep,” Nora said after a while.

We found toothpaste tubes and syringes and plastic bags and pieces of flip flops. A diaper.

Up on higher ground among the raked grooves and ridges, between the tables and under umbrellas and beach chairs, there were shell fragments and even some tiny whole shells – the size of Nora’s pinky fingernails. Sometimes the size of mine. And shards of still-sharp glass fresh from tourists’ revelry, not yet softened by the sea. And pieces of plastic microtrash.

I tested the pieces, trying to discern shells from trash.

Nora lit up with excitement at each new discovery.

“Look at this purple one, Mom!” She handed me a piece of microplastic and I exclaimed-swallowed, “Wow!”

I was distracted by commotion on the beach where a group of people inflated balloons in an ill-planned team building exercise as the wind flapped my coverup. They laughed when a green balloon popped, its plastic pieces falling to the beach, or when a red one escaped careless hands and flew away toward the resorts lining the coast. And then a yellow one. As my eyes fixated on the green broken balloon, my mind drifted to the turtle rescue center just a couple of kilometers away where last year a sea turtle floated listlessly waiting for the laxatives to move through her system so she could could excrete the plastic which made it impossible for her to dive below the surface. I imagined her ingesting these team building fragments.

I almost went to talk with them, but Nora held me back.

“I want someone to be near me to look for shells and I choose you,” she said as I turned to walk down to the beach to pick up the shards of plastic. I looked around willing a warden in the Marine “Sanctuary” to stop the insanity. No one saw or nobody cared or maybe they too were pinned to their square foot of sand in search of microscopic shells and maybe also a little bit relieved that their five year old gave them a good excuse not to speak up.

“Oooh, look!” Nora held up a piece of seafoam green plastic. “Sea glass!”

I winced away.

Later, Nora carefully washed her treasures and assembled them in a bowl (an ashtray) which she asked me to fill with water and place on her bedside table. The sea glass bobbed to the surface.

“This is really special sea glass, Mom!” Nora observed.

“Hmmm…” I started and then couldn’t help myself, “Why do you think it’s floating?”

As soon as they dropped, I wished I could put all of that reality back in my big fat mouth and turn toward the magic.

But thankfully, at five, Nora is an authority on all.of.the.things.

“It’s sea glass filled with plastic, Mom!”

Nora’s heart drifted toward the clouds while mine hovered in the liminal space above the bottom of the ashtray but also not floating on top. This between-magic-and-rock-bottom space is mine to occupy as her mother while she takes flight.

Ahh! The book review!

If you’re a mom, read My Oceans. If you’re a dad, read My Oceans. If you’re a caretaker raising a being on this planet – human or more-than – read My Oceans. You will find special sea glass amidst tales of survival, mountains of cognitive dissonance, and expanses of existential-essential grappling. And, art. I cried and my stomach turned with the pages and roiling waves of grief and hope. In My Oceans, I found delicately arranged seaweed pods filled with rugged mountain and heavy coastal air, whales carrying each others’ sorrows, mothers’ ever-growing mental load on a warming planet, women unraveling and dancing and finding themselves alone and together, and many calls to action nested in honesty and forgiveness about not knowing what to do. Rivera’s book is a special sea glass testimonial and love song for our ‘one-among-billions’ universe.

❤️B

Coda: My writing time is up for today, but I found this beautiful, wholly intact, palm-sized shell this afternoon after I wrote this.

And PS - I just signed up for an “Emotional Chronology” writing workshop with BK Loren. Anyone want to join me?