Aronnax released

 

I know a guy named Herb who liked this when it was serialized on Kindle Vella, so that's at least one satisfied reader.

Which is to say, I have released Aronnax as a paperback book.  

For those who might be reading this but are unfamiliar with the story, this is, as the subtitle suggests, "a tale of twenty thousand leagues," the twenty thousand leagues, as in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne, also known as the Captain Nemo story.

Although my version doesn't lean on Nemo so much as the French biologist Pierre Aronnax, whose discovery of Nemo is the impetus for the original story.  In the present, Pierre's descendants Sylvio and his son Julian embark on an improbable journey of resubmerging Nemo's ship, the Nautilus, which in recent decades has become a forgotten neighborhood landmark, the "yellow submarine" (several chapter titles are indeed drawn from the Beatles song), a journey of discovery and self-discovery.

It's another novella, but it was a project that started out much differently and ended up becoming a personal favorite, not the least because it drew on my own family ancestry, and family in general.