Humans are animals. This is not necessarily a revelatory statement. Yet Julia Hannafin, in their debut novel Cascade, confronts this fact afresh in a poignant and dazzling exploration of the conditions in which we feel our animality. 

Set amid a marine biology expedition on an island off the coast of San Francisco, Cascade literalizes the liminality of adolescence. The narrator, Lydia, has taken a gap year from college and left her ex-boyfriend Julian to take his place an an intern on his father’s research team, which entails spending her autumn on the Farallon Islands with only a few companions—Julian’s father Michael, an older man called Captain, and Zeke, a PhD student. 

This new family replaces the family Lydia’s leaving behind—a grieving mother, Erin, reeling from the loss of Lydia’s other mom, Blake, from an overdose. Lydia isn’t fleeing her grief, per se, but rather moving it to a new home, where cell service is spotty and only the animals and a few other humans provide mirrors for her experience. Michael’s research is focused on shark migration patterns, and the team’s daily work involves taking a boat out into the ocean and recording their observations of the sharks’ behavior. For Lydia, observing these animals slips into observing herself; noting their bodies becomes an investigation into her own.

At the end of the first chapter, when the team has arrived on the island, Lydia realizes: “it’s not a joke anymore, or even an obsession; there I am in my body, a surprise.” The surprise of the body is the cornerstone of the other surprises in Cascade. As the research team settles into their routine, Lydia faces her growing desire for Michael, her boss and her ex-boyfriend’s father. Michael is a competent, dedicated researcher whose affinity with the sharks seems to supplant his interest in other humans. Lydia’s need for his attention surfaces as a desire to matter to him in the context of his work, to be a skilled worker and to be his partner in caring for the animals. When the two, alone on a boat, witness the attack of one of the sharks by a team of orcas, the attack jolts the pair into proximity and Lydia into agency: “We are sharing a feeling, and a closeness, its shaky edges running through the both of us […] I kiss Michael. He tastes sour. I taste sea water. I taste blood. I am not sinking but floating. I am not floating but swimming.” 

Hannafin’s depiction of the attraction between a young woman and her older boss is truly refreshing, as it is grounded in Lydia’s discovery of her identity and what she desires both with and for her body. Michael is imperfect, a semi-recovering alcoholic battling his own impulses, but he doesn’t abuse Lydia’s idealization of him. Lydia’s mother Blake was herself an addict who died from an overdose, and a brilliant sequence at the core of the book, in which Lydia gets drunk with her roommate Zeke and then seeks out Michael’s bedroom, is a powerful depiction of how family patterns are embodied and then carried out again outside the home. There is a legacy of pain in Lydia’s body, but Cascade is ultimately about how Lydia chooses more for her life than to live only in her grief. Instead of floating, she swims. Like a shark, she has to move forward to stay alive. Hannafin beautifully subverts the reader’s expectations of an affair narrative with a realistic consideration of how young people’s worth is mined from the adults in their lives.

Queerness and gender are also central to this story and to Hannafin’s consideration of bodies. Lydia was raised by lesbian mothers, and though she herself sleeps with men, her desire is intermingled with a kind of envy. In this context, her attraction to Michael morphs into a wish to become him. By supplanting his son’s role on the research trip, Lydia is taking Julian’s place as Michael’s successor, the person who will grow into his body. When Lydia feels important and valued, she feels more fully and solidly embodied. For example, when Lydia and Michael carry an injured Zeke from the beach back to their house, she experiences a transformation: “My shoulders expand under Zeke’s mass. My arms strengthen. My hips even out at the sides, pushing my torso wider. My feet grow […] We become a set of crutches, me left and Michael right.” Imagining her body as strong and cohesive with Michael’s means imagining a more masculine body for herself. Through subtle gestures like this throughout the novel, Hannafin reminds us that affirming one’s gender is an inherent part of building a comfortable relationship with embodiment. 

Hannafin’s writing is lovely and controlled, their words and sentences carefully connected. The world of Cascade is contained, each paragraph and scene building towards the book’s culmination. Through a near-drowning experience, Lydia is finally able to come face-to-face, as it were, with the loss of her mother; as she becomes untethered from her body, she feels her mother’s presence. In this climactic scene, Hannafin reveals what becomes possible when the body is forgotten—something that, after all, isn’t possible at all. Like overdose, drowning is a release of the self from the containment of the animal form. Floating downwards, Lydia wonders: “If I die, will I be part of the ocean?” To escape the animal of one’s body is an understandable desire in reaction to grief, but from within one’s lungs, life demands to be lived.

Cascade is a quietly thrilling novel, its themes impressively woven into a moving tale of grief and self-discovery. Lydia’s character and story are both idiosyncratic and wholly real, her emotions utterly convincing. This is a book to be savored. 

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Born and raised in Berkeley, Julia Hannafin now lives in Los Angeles. They have written episodes for television. Cascade is her debut novel.

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Grace Novarr is a recent graduate of Barnard College, where she edited the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism. She lives in Brooklyn and works as an assistant at a literary agency.