Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Tessa Yang to HJ!
Hi Tessa and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, The Jellyfish Problem!
Hello! Thanks for having me!
Please summarize the book for the readers here:
The Jellyfish Problem is the story of a marine biologist named Jo Ness who’s recently lost her best friend and research collaborator, Aldo. In chapter one, Jo unexpectedly gets a phone call from her unrequited college crush, Nadia, asking her to come investigate a giant jellyfish that’s been menacing the little Maine island where Nadia now lives. Some combination of curiosity, rekindled romantic interest, and the need for a distraction from her grief compels Jo to go. What she ends up discovering on the island changes how she thinks about jellyfish and herself.
Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:
“Nothing lasts forever. Except jellyfish.”
Please share a few Fun facts about this book…
- I spent about two years researching jellyfish for this novel. Other topics I researched were scuba diving, historic lighthouses, and Japanese folklore.
- The decision to give my giant jellyfish a whimsical name—Clementine—was inspired by the movie Nope, where the monster is named Jean Jacket. (I have no idea why I picked “Clementine.” Was I maybe eating a clementine that day?)
- Clementine’s physical appearance was inspired by MBARI’s footage of deep-sea siphonophores.
- “Jellyfish problems” was the title I thoughtlessly gave the Word document where I was writing. I did not expect that to evolve into the title of the actual book!
Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?
While at a low point for View Spoiler », Jo gets drunk and kind of throws herself at her bed and breakfast host, a woman named Tony. It’s a scene that’s lightly spicy and pretty awkward. I wrote it so many different ways and it was a lot of fun:
I straightened too quickly, stumbling over a seam in the sidewalk. Tony reached out to steady me. I didn’t pause to think about it: I put my hand on the back of her neck and pulled her lips to mine.
She tensed, then leaned into me hard. Shock at my own boldness fizzled into a delight that crackled to the ends of my hair. Tony tasted like the ocean and moved with its fluid power, her body contouring perfectly into mine. She propelled me backward into the lamp post and I slid my fingers up the hot skin of her lower back, feeling her tremble. Or was I the one who was trembling? Elation bore down on me when I realized I couldn’t tell where Tony ended and I began.
Precious seconds slipped by unnoticed before she withdrew. I floundered and tripped, coming to rest in a dazed pile at the foot of the lamp post.
Tony looked down at me and shook her head. “You smell like a backed-up drain.”
She turned on her heel and marched toward the B and B.
Readers should read this book….
If you like adventure, science, romance, folklore, jellyfish, or any combination of those things!
What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?
I’m working on my next novel, which is also a genre-bendy type of story, one that imports fantastical elements into a modern-day setting. It’s early enough in the process that I won’t share specific plot details, but I’ll say that while there are no jellyfish, there’s a lovable old cat.
Thanks for blogging at HJ!
Giveaway: One copy of THE JELLYFISH PROBLEM for a U. S. only winner.
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Excerpt from The Jellyfish Problem:
Jellyfish is a misnomer. Fish are cold-blooded vertebrates that respire through gills. Jellyfish are bloodless invertebrates that exchange gases directly through their skin. The spinelessness of jellies-their apparent frailness-has led to the word’s slang meaning: a weakling or a doormat. A person devoid of a backbone.
We hope this book will prove jellyfish to be anything but weaklings. As we’ll show in the coming chapters, you don’t need a backbone to inspire awe, to elicit fear, to change the world.
AA: Too much?
JN: Just enough.
There are certain people from your past whom you never expect to resurface. Nadia was one of mine. We’d had a short-lived, intense friendship near the end of college before graduating and heading down our separate paths. Though I thought of her often in the intervening decade-thought of, in particular, the night we’d spent together on the roof of the science building, stars above, Nadia’s head heavy on my chest-I hadn’t tried to reach out. Why would I? She’d made it clear that whatever existed between us was over, graduation the perfect excuse to sever a connection that had always meant more to me than to her.
I couldn’t think of a single reason for her to be calling me from an unfamiliar number at half past five in the morning on a Tuesday in May after eleven years of silence, but that was what happened.
“Hi! Is this Josie?”
I knew it was her immediately because Nadia was the only person who’d ever called me by that name. I had been Jo and Josephine and Jo-Ness spit to sound like Jonas by a high school softball coach disgusted by my tendency to daydream in the outfield-snap out of it, Jo-Ness!-and in the scuba diving class I took to get certified at sixteen, I was even briefly known as Nessie, as in the lake monster, due to having an air consumption rate so low I was presumed to be partially aquatic.
Josie belonged to Nadia because she claimed it, and I let her.
My shoulders screamed out in pain as I straightened from my desk, where I’d fallen asleep over my laptop. The screen had gone black, sparing me the separate agony of confronting the pages of my book manuscript-The Modern Medusa: A Jellyfish Primer by Josephine Ness and Aldo Antunes-still covered in unresolved comments: mine, and Aldo’s.
As I cleared the gravel from my throat and blinked away the last clinging dregs of sleep, the familiar contours of my office at Seaheart swam into focus. The white wall bearing my framed diplomas and Ocean Conservancy calendar, still open to January’s image of spawning corals. The broken filing cabinet whose top drawer rolled determinedly open unless sealed with a piece of masking tape. The desk plastered with a quilt of sticky notes, the oldest so old they’d lost their stick and fluttered around each time I patted down the area seeking whatever item I’d lost track of.
It wasn’t always like this. Aldo used to scold me for being a neat freak. Then he died and my world tipped into an entropy I couldn’t control. Power cords snaked out of nowhere to trip me. Just-washed mugs reappeared in front of me, silty with the cold sediment of coffee I didn’t remember drinking. The voice of an old friend slipped through a cracked-open door, beckoning me into the corridor of our shared past.
“Nadia? Nadia Markov?” I said. “Is that really you?”
It was pleasant spending the next several minutes catching up, filling in with broad strokes our lives since undergrad. Nadia had taught English overseas for a few years, gotten her master’s in education, bounced around various districts looking for the right fit, and was now teaching in a one-room schoolhouse on a remote island off the coast of Maine. I told her I worked as the research coordinator at a small aquarium, brazenly perched at the waterless edge of Joshua Tree. Small sounded specialized and cozy, which Seaheart was. Small didn’t necessarily scream short-staffed and broke, which Seaheart also was.
“Oh my god, you’re on the West Coast? What time is it there?” cried Nadia. “I’m so sorry, Josie, I thought you were still in the Northeast . . . I was trying to catch you before work.”
I reassured her it was okay without adding that I was already at work, because I hadn’t left work, because I’d effectively moved into work, converting my bottom desk drawer into an overnight kit complete with a spare set of clothing, deodorant, toothbrush, and a mini tube of travel toothpaste. What had begun as a contingency plan for those late nights when the hour-plus commute back to my apartment in Riverside didn’t seem worth it had fast evolved into the new norm. It was all hands on deck for those of us who’d survived the latest round of layoffs. And I slept better on my office’s rock-hard love seat than in my own bed. The guilty dreams didn’t follow me here.
By now I was in the staff room, trying to wrest a mug from the dish rack without causing an avalanche. The aquarium’s cleaner had quit last year, and Elijah Pinsky, Seaheart’s director and general curator, refused to replace her, insisting the staff could learn to clean up after ourselves. I felt newly attuned to my untidy surroundings when I compared them to where I imagined Nadia was calling from. I put her in an airy beach house with sea-green walls, gauzy pastel curtains, and handwoven baskets full of beautiful rocks. Her fridge door displayed magnets from her travels, each one pinning a photograph of an adoring friend.
I successfully rescued a mug, then turned in a helpless circle looking for the coffeepot.
“Are you still into jellyfish?” Nadia asked me.
Was I still into jellyfish?
I had an October deadline for the jellyfish book Aldo and I had been writing for three years, which I was helplessly stalled on now that I had to finish it alone. I saw jellyfish everywhere: in the slow-motion shimmy of a plastic bag being shaken open, in the swirl of water around the bathtub drain, in spiderwebs and raindrops, in the scoop of light floating inside a contact lens. Jellyfish were my first thought on waking and my last thought before falling asleep, and their graceful, translucent bodies undulated through the dreams that fell between. Not one but two women had dumped me on the grounds that I liked jellyfish more than I liked people.
I confirmed for Nadia that I was still into jellyfish.
“That’s awesome. Because if I’m being honest, that’s why I called you. We’re having a bit of a jellyfish problem on the island-actually, we’re having a really big jellyfish problem.”
“You mean like a bloom?” I hadn’t read anything about a high-density jellyfish swarm in New England, though it wasn’t impossible that one had turned up there. Across the planet, blooms were on the rise. Theories as to why varied depending upon whom you asked. Aldo was a proponent of the wax-and-wane theory: jellyfish numbers oscillating as part of a natural cycle, with expected peaks and valleys over time. I countered that climate change created ecological vacuums where jellyfish could thrive like never before. We had butted heads on the subject so often, it nearly derailed our book.
“It’s probably easiest if I show you,” said Nadia. “Hang on, sending it now.”
Excerpted from The Jellyfish Problem by Tessa Yang Copyright © 2026 by Tessa Yang. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Book Info:
A marine biologist makes the discovery of a lifetime when called to rescue the inhabitants of a small Maine island being menaced by a giant, glowing jellyfish in this richly imagined, wholly original debut.
Dr. Jo Ness prefers jellyfish to people. Her best friend, Aldo, was the exception, but he died seven months ago. So she spends her days hidden away at an underfunded aquarium with her specimens and a draft of the jellyfish guide she and Aldo had been working on together. His voice is alive in the notes in the margins, and it’s enough. Almost.
Until she receives a call from Nadia, one of the few other humans she’s loved but whom she hasn’t heard from in years, asking for her help. Nadia tells her a grand tale of a giant jellyfish terrorizing her tiny island off the coast of Maine and sends a grainy video of the creature. Frankly, the footage looks fake, but Jo drops everything to fly across the country to see Nadia again, and to find this supposed sea beast. She couldn’t save Aldo, but perhaps she can help Nadia.
But when Jo arrives on Shattering Point, Nadia is nowhere to be found, and the islanders she meets each have something different to say about the creature they’ve dubbed Clementine . . . a jellyfish who changes all who see it.
At turns an ode to classic sea monster stories and a vibrant tale of human connection, The Jellyfish Problem is an unforgettable debut that announces a new talent.
Meet the Author:
Tessa Yang is the author of the short story collection The Runaway Restaurant. Her work has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Cincinnati Review, Joyland, Foglifter, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Indiana University and currently lives in Upstate New York. This is her first novel.
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