Content Warning: The Young Man and the Sea depicts depression and alcohol addiction and mentions death.

Twelve-year-old Samuel “Skiff” Beaman Jr. narrates The Young Man and the Sea in first person and present tense. School lets out for summer and Skiff rides his bicycle home, past the harbor in Spinney Cove, Maine. His father Skiff Sr.’s fishing boat, the Mary Rose—named after his deceased mother—has sunk next to their dock. Skiff’s been bailing water out of the boat for months, in case his father decides to start fishing again. Since Skiff’s mother Mary Rose died, Skiff Sr. mostly drinks beer and sits in front of the TV in silence. Skiff alerts his father that the boat sunk, but he doesn’t seem to care. He says Skiff should leave the boat where it is, because even if they raise it, it is probably broken beyond repair.

Skiff studies the Mary Rose, but there’s nothing he can do except wait for the tide, then try to wedge it out. Twelve-year-old Tyler Croft appears on an expensive bicycle to bully him about the boat and being a working-class “swamp” person, as well as his mother being dead and his father drinking.