Among other things, I've taken up smoking

Summary: "Miranda's father has always seemed to her as elusive and impenetrable as the thick New England fog that surrounds their isolated home. Just after she was born, her parents moved from chaotic Manhattan to a tiny sea-misted island off the coast of Maine so that her father could work on his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses." "Not long after, her mother took the boat out, disappeared into the fog, and never came back. Miranda grew up in the lonely house on Crab Island caring for her brilliant but troubled father and sustaining herself with fantasies fueled by stories of ill-fated, lustful nymphs and vengeful gods that he read to her from his manuscript." "Serious and soulful, her only true friend was Mr. Blackwell - a fisherman who helped her father adjust to life on the island all those years ago, and whose relationship with him is - like so much else about her father - complicated and mysterious." "When Miranda graduates from high school, her father announces that he has arranged for her to travel to Manhattan to stay with friends from his old life, and Miranda embarks on a journey from one kind of island to another - a journey that will finally reveal the truth about her father's past and open up her world in ways she cannot begin to imagine."--BOOK JACKET.