"Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms - what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.
Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency's work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos." --Goodreads blurb
Leigh, who doesn't feel close to family or friends, but instead has a career her life revolves around, has the opportunity to work in the field to gain experience. What is found is so incredible and strange it changes the trajectory of her life forever. As she weighs obligations with scientific discovery, she finds that home ever beckons. This cerebral and literary science fiction novel is so incredibly dense and feels very sweeping. The writing style was solid in two capacities: it was solidly written, but it was also solid...like a brick wall. It felt like over half of the novel was so compacted with information and world-building with no detail given to the character at all. It's my personal preference to have a lot of dialogue and character building, and this felt sterile. This was such an interesting story, though, and am glad I read it. The narration for this was great and really helped keep me intrigued and honestly probably helped me stick with a book that could have been a DNF for me.
