Sand Dollar Cove

What if you could live in paradise for free?

 The only catch is that you can’t leave for five years.

Every five years, Sand Dollar Cove returns to our world for exactly ten days.

For the islanders, those ten days mean everything.

Ships bring medicine, food, machinery, books, and everything the community will need until the next return. Families wait at the dock for loved ones who left five years earlier. Young islanders prepare to leave for college and lives on the mainland. Others arrive knowing that when the final ferry departs, there will be no changing their minds.

Because Sand Dollar Cove doesn’t simply become hidden.

It disappears into another world.

For Etta, the return means deciding whether the future she wants lies beyond the island that has always been home. For Marta, keeper of the island registry, it means confronting old records that suggest some who supposedly died may simply have chosen never to return. And for Jaxon, questions about his family lead to discoveries about Sand Dollar Cove itself, including the impossible secret hidden inside the island’s sand dollars.

As the final day approaches, old loyalties are tested, secrets surface, and everyone on Sand Dollar Cove faces the same question:

When the last ferry leaves, which world will you choose?

A warm, mysterious contemporary fantasy about family, freedom, belonging, and the places we choose to call home.

Sand Dollar Cove will appeal to readers of Adrienne Young’s The Unmaking of June Farrow, T.J. Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, and Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January. Like those novels, it blends an impossible place with deeply human questions about family, belonging, and the life we choose for ourselves. But Sand Dollar Cove adds its own unusual dilemma: every five years, an island returns to our world for only ten days. During that brief window, families reunite, young people leave for new lives, supplies must last another five years, and everyone must decide which side of the water they want to be on when the island disappears again. 

Coming October 12, 2026, on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Google Books.