To Night Owl From Dogfish

To Night Owl from Dogfish is a middle-grade novel by Holly Goldberg Sloan, published in 2019. It is an epistolary novel, meaning it is composed of letters, emails, voicemail transcripts, text messages, and other pieces of communication between characters. Much of the novel consists of emails between the novel’s two protagonists, 12-year-old girls Bett Devlin and Avery Bloom. Although Bett and Avery seem to have very little in common and live in different states, they begin writing to each other after discovering that their fathers are in a romantic relationship and want the girls to become friends or even “sisters”—an idea that both girls initially resist. The novel explores themes of The Diversity of Family Structures and Found Family; Tradition, Change, and Acceptance; and The Process of Growing Up.

Plot Summary

Bett Devlin first emails Avery Bloom to explain that their two fathers, Marlow Devlin (a builder from California) and Sam Bloom (an architect from New York City), have begun dating each other. Bett is not happy about this, having gotten used to being an only child with a single parent.