Girl Overboard (S.A.S.S.: Students Across the Seven Seas)

Aimee Ferris’s Girl Overboard follows Marina, a determined high-schooler who dreams of life at sea and scientific discovery. Immersed in a Caribbean study-abroad program aboard a luxury yacht, she grapples with the lure of independence and the pull of a long-term relationship left behind. The narrative tracks her enthusiasm for hands-on marine biology as she works alongside marine life and navigates the social currents aboard a floating classroom. Ferris sketches Marina’s ambitions with brisk, buoyant prose that captures the sunlit immediacy of sea-air and new friendships. Yet the voyage is tempered by occasional self-doubt and the friction between idealized adventure and real-world responsibility. The book charts a coming-of-age in which curiosity and courage are tested by the demands of independence, peer dynamics, and cultural immersion. Across its brisk episodes, Marina must decide what kind of future she wants—one anchored to a shoreward romance or to uncharted waters of her own making. The result is a lightweight, energetic exploration of adolescence set against a mariner’s horizon.