Safe Harbor by Nicola Yoon and David Yoon
Monday, June 22, 2026 at 9:13AM 
Published by Amazon Original Stories on June 23, 2026
“Safe Harbor” is one of six entries in the “Edge of Everything” series of Amazon Original Stories that focus on coming-of-age themes. The story is shallow, but it might be comforting for parents who want to believe that their kids are capable of divining deep truths about themselves after spending a day with a therapist.
The story is narrated by a teenage girl named Isabel. To assure the absence of doubt about her “mood and angst level,” Isabel wears black eyeliner and black lipstick while painting her nails black and dressing in black combat boots. Isabel accuses her mother of not feeling her emotions, presumably because her mother doesn’t broadcast her emotions through depressing fashion choices.
Isabel’s parents divorced after her father took up with a younger woman. Isabel wants to return to the version of herself she was before the divorce (and wants to once again believe that love is real) but she doesn’t know how. This seems more like something a 40-year-old might say while explaining her emotional struggles when she was a teen, but much of the story struck me as being similarly artificial.
Isabel took an impulsive action that was symbolically destructive but not particularly damaging — Isabel, we are meant to understand, is a good kid who would never do anything really bad — but her parents decided to send her to the Safe Harbor program for teenage children of divorced parents. The program lasts only eight hours, but Isabel acts as if she has been exiled to Siberia. Well, she’s a teenage girl, so she is the essence of drama and overreaction.
There will be an assessment at the end of the day. The therapist will decide which attendees should be recommended for a six-week Saturday morning counseling program. Isabel makes an effort to participate only because she doesn’t want to ruin her Saturday mornings. Perhaps not wearing black lipstick would have been a smarter plan to achieve that goal.
Isabel draws charcoal sketches of other arriving teens, labeling them with pithy judgments, including SCREENAGER and DIVA. When the therapist arrives, they do exercises to work out their “big feelings.” As each kid talks (or doesn’t) about his or her parents’ divorce, the reader encounters a collection of troubled teens who would have been at home in The Breakfast Club. Gray is angry, Preethi is a people pleaser, Joey uses his phone as a shield against his warring parents, Lilliam shops at designer boutiques because her wealthy parents don’t have time for her. Lilliam is Molly Ringwald, Gray is Judd Nelson — you get the drift.
As the kids open up (which they do with surprising ease), Isabel withdraws her judgment of SCREENAGER and DIVA and realizes that they are struggling with their own issues just as she is struggling with hers. So yes, the story is a condensed and simplistic version of The Breakfast Club, without the hijinks and brutal honesty that made the movie a classic.
The kids are aided by a therapist who has problems of her own (her husband died and she is planning to wed her new boyfriend but they’re arguing about the wedding plans). Rather unprofessionally, she puts her fiancé on speaker and the kids hear them arguing. The therapist turns it into a teaching moment. Seriously?
Isabel makes several statements to broadcast her emotional maturity to the reader, including “I can be a big coward hiding behind a sketchbook to avoid the real world” and “I’m secretly as hopeful for this therapy session as I am scared of it” and “This is something different, something I realize I’ve been hungry for. This is someone saying, out loud, my fears and sorrows.” If she already has this level of insight, why does she need therapy? I didn’t buy any of it. Nor did I buy the pollyannish ending.
Maybe this could have evolved into a meatier story by developing the characters in depth. Having each kid give a two-sentence summation of the reason he or she was consigned to therapy camp doesn’t cut it. As a short story, “Safe Harbor” isn’t worth even the few minutes it will take a reader to consume it.
NOT RECOMMENDED