by Kate Christensen
First sentence: “As Christine walked out of the air conditioned terminal into the balmy, sweet air of Southern California, she inhaled sharply and wanted to laugh.”
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Review copy provided by the publisher.
Content: There’s a lot of swearing (including multiple f-bombs) and some on-screen sex. It’s in the adult fiction section of the bookstore.

I’m going to pitch this the same way the publisher rep pitched it to us. It’s a great character study set on this cruise ship — the last cruise of an old, retiring ship — and that’s all you think it is until something happens — I’m not going to say what — and everything gets really intense. You probably  won’t want to read this while on a cruise.

See, I don’t know what you’d expect from that, but I expected something Really Interesting. A murder perhaps. Or an accident that capsizes the ship. Something… intense. He was right: it is a really good character study of three main characters. A Hungarian chef, who wasn’t supposed to be on the cruise and who is considering getting out to start a restaurant (or something) and who just wants to be with his girlfriend in Paris; a New England farmer’s wife, who maybe just wants a little more out of her life; and an Israeli violist, who is in love with the first violinist in her quartet, whose wife has recently died and so they are now able to follow their hearts.

But, it never got intense. The Thing I Was Waiting For never happened. Something did happen — the engine dies, they’re stranded at sea, and everyone gets sick with norovirus — and when it first started I thought it was going to be big. But, it really wasn’t. They floated along for a week or so, and then they were rescued. A few people died from the sickness. Meh.

I think Christensen missed out on a really good opportunity by not focusing on the disgruntled kitchen staff — they organized a walk out to demand higher pay and their contracts reinstated  but it got lost in the engines dying — that sounded like it could be an interesting story.

In the end, this was just a reminder of why I don’t read too many adult fiction books.