Float Plan by Trish Doller - REVEW

Float Plan by Trish Doller

Publication Date: March 2nd, 2021

Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin

Genre: Contemporary

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Synopsis:

Since the loss of her fiancé, Anna has been shipwrecked by grief—until a reminder goes off about a trip they were supposed to take together. Impulsively, Anna goes to sea in their sailboat, intending to complete the voyage alone.

But after a treacherous night’s sail, she realizes she can’t do it by herself and hires Keane, a professional sailor, to help. Much like Anna, Keane is struggling with a very different future than the one he had planned. As romance rises with the tide, they discover that it’s never too late to chart a new course.

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Thoughts:

Just like the synopsis, this book is short and sweet. Easily read in one sitting but leaving you with the feeling that you got something out of it.

The first page of this book is unbelievably heavy though, in that it start out with the suicide note written by our main characters fiance. I really wasn’t expecting that going in but I would highly encourage you to look into trigger warnings for this book prior to reading it if you find such resources helpful.

The format in which Float Plan was written did not flow very nicely and felt very choppy at times. Anna’s inner dialog was extremely stream of consciousness and very much not the style of writing that I enjoy which did hinder my rating to be honest. That being said, I can completely appreciate if this was intentional. The way it was written could totally be a representation of Anna’s state of mind and her life at this point in time. It’s stilted and hurt and trying to find some sense of solidity. However, I’m leaning towards this not being intentional because it carried through to the end of the book.

I enjoyed the path that we took alongside Anna, though. As someone who had a (very) brief stint in sailing many years ago, I can understand the sense of feeling like you can handle a boat yourself but not truly knowing what you got yourself into until it is maybe too late. Everything about the sailing felt real which was great. The progress of learning to relying on ones self, of trust, of growth, it was all nicely done on a few different levels.

The romance did have wonderful progression and felt natural but then things got really jumbled up near the end. Weird choices were made in order to really drive the ‘I can handle it on my own’ point home and a few other decisions left me questioning. But Keane was a really good balance for Anna for the most part.

All that being said, I still appreciated the story at its core and I liked most of the character choices - particularly Keane’s prosthetic and outlook. It could have done with a bit finer editing and bringing the scenes together with transitioning moments or expanding a bit more but I still really enjoyed it.