Ahoy there, bookworms!

I hope you’ve been having a great October. Things with grad school are reaching critical mass and I’m desperately running out of time, so book reviews may be a bit more clipped than usual for the next month or so.

Today’s book review is Float Plan by Trish Doller.

I wanted to get more contemporary romance under my wing for my fiction reading assignment for the semester, so I dove right in. On to the review!

Blurb

Critically acclaimed author Trish Doller’s unforgettable and romantic adult debut about setting sail, starting over, and finding yourself…

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.

In Trish Doller’s unforgettable Float Plan, starting over doesn’t mean letting go of your past, it means making room for your future.

GoodReads

Amazon

***Brief disclosure***

I am an Amazon affiliate and earn a tiny commission for purchases made through the Amazon links in this post at no cost to you. It’s a great way to help me keep things running on my blog if you’re already intrigued enough to make a purchase. 

The Review

Not having read many contemporary romances prior, I wasn’t sure how I would feel about this novel. In the end I did enjoy myself, but it wasn’t a perfect read.

In this book we follow alongside Anna, who decides to embark on a long journey by boat when she receives a notification her deceased husband set before his death on her phone. Still grief-ridden by his suicide, Anna battles her emotions while searching for a new way forward in life.

Anna has had quite a rough year coping with her husband’s suicide. I think that the author handled the MC’s dealing of this turbulent time pretty well. I’m fairly well versed on the stages of grief, but they don’t always come in the order we’d expect. This part of her characterization felt authentic.

I listened along via audiobook, and the inflection in Anna’s voice felt spot on and made her character come to life a bit more than if I had read this via eBook. Numerous characters in this book had accents, and though not all of them translated the way I think they were intended, I did like most of them, especially Keane’s. You just can’t beat a solid Irish accent.

Along Anna’s journey she finds romance, and while I enjoyed it in general, it felt a little easy to me. Anna’s clearly dealing with some personal demons, but the love interest Keane was pretty much the perfect guy with very minimal flaws. I would have liked more character flaws to make it more realistic.

I found that the plot helped keep things fresh. Anna is on a sea bound journey, but she hardly knows what she’s doing (her deceased husband usually handled everything), so she had to learn from experience quickly. At the same time, there was a lot of boat jargon that got confusing for me. I wasn’t sure what all the parts were or what their function was, and I would’ve liked Anna to explain things for those who aren’t educated in this way, especially since she is an amateur herself.

Ultimately, I think readers of contemporary romance will enjoy this sea bound stint, but for me there was something lacking from the experience. The writing, the characters, the plot. None of these elements really gripped me the way I’d hoped, and I believe there may be more worthy contemporary romance titles out there.

That’s A Wrap!

Well that’s it for this book review. I hope you enjoyed it!

Have you read this book? Are there other similar books you’ve read that you simply have to gush about? Feel free to leave a comment. I’d love to start a conversation!

Have a great day!

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