The summer Maeve Donnelly was 12, she was bitten by a blacktip shark and kissed by Daniel, the first boy she ever loved. She grew up to be a marine biologist, taking off around the world to study sharks, but always returning to home base: her grandmother Perri's beachfront Florida hotel. After a research trip to Bimini, Maeve comes home to find Daniel--now her ex-fiancé--is the hotel's new chef, and her twin brother, Robin, is about to publish a novel that's a thinly veiled version of Maeve's life story. Meanwhile, an illegal shark-finning operation has sprung up just miles away, and she is determined to stop it. Ann Kidd Taylor explores the collisions of Maeve's past and present in her debut novel, The Shark Club.
The first-person voice is wry and appealing; Maeve has a keen eye for details of the natural world, but struggles to identify and catalogue her relationships so neatly. After seven years, she's still not sure she can forgive Daniel for an old betrayal, though she's rapidly falling in love with his precocious daughter, Hazel, founder of the titular Shark Club. Kidd Taylor writes with deep empathy about Maeve's efforts to reckon with her past wounds and move forward. Readers will also come to understand Maeve's (and Hazel's) fascination with sharks, even if, like Robin, they don't share it.
Absorbing and well-written, Kidd Taylor's narrative is a bittersweet story of love, complicated family ties and living with the past while refusing to be defined by it. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams