Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea by Ashley Herring Blake

My own heart often feels cavernous, unknowable in its relentless hunger, questions, and needs. The deep, dark ocean felt like the perfect place for Hazel to discover herself-it’s mysterious and terrifying, but there’s something achingly beautiful about it too, something that pulls you in and wraps around your heart.įor me, that something is the mystery. A scary process, full of unknown emotions and fear that you’ll never quite find yourself again. It was something she had to embrace as forever a part of who she was, and learn how to see beauty, to love, to let people love her, through that loss. As I sat down to write Hazel’s story, I knew the loss of her mother wasn’t something she needed to get over or move past. I’m not the same person I was before my mother died suddenly in 2012, and I’ll never be that person again. Loss changes people, changes their hearts, their minds. It’s a circle and you travel its endless path forever. Grief isn’t a phase you simply walk through and come out the other side. The task of coming back from the loss of a loved one seems insurmountable, impossibly even, until you realize the truth. I knew what that felt like and I knew there were many kids out there who did too. In the book, Hazel has lost a parent to an accident, but she’s lost much more than that-she’s lost herself, she’s lost the ability to see possibility, to hope. I wanted my character, Hazel, to grapple with these same questions, and I could think of no better setting for her than the deep blue sea-the most beautiful, dangerous, and mysterious element on our planet.

What do you do? How do you actually move on, as it seemed so easy for others to do? For me, a woman whose own parents were both dead by her early thirties, those questions had always been a mystery. When I sat down to write my next middle grade novel, I knew I wanted to tell a story about loss, about life after the unthinkable happens. To me, that’s a staggering number, almost overwhelming, to think of all those deeps no human has touched, all the possibilities we haven’t even thought of yet.

More than eighty percent of the world’s oceans remain unexplored.

Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea by Ashley Herring Blake