Book Review: "Afloat"

An interesting premise — floating condominiums built over a cove. Even without reading the story, my first thought was that the safety of living there would totally depend on the integrity of the support structure. But, I also immediately thought, "How cool would that be?!"

Healy did a reasonably good job of developing her characters. I mistrusted Tony (developer) from the get-go. I liked and trusted Vance (architect) throughout the whole story - he seemed afraid to commit, though. I felt sorry for Danielle — she was so desperate for love, affirmation, and acceptance that she was willing to compromise her principles and to believe her own lies about who really cared for her.

I was intrigued from the beginning: Who was the man in the wet suit? What kind of structure was he swimming around? What were the containers for — it did sound sinister? What were the sardine-sized creatures that flashed? Add to that, the complicated relationships between Danielle, Tony, and Vance, a freak storm, the danger of not only the destruction of the floating condominiums but the danger to the lives of the group in the occupied unit, and the building awareness that there is real evil at work and this turned into a really good story.

There are some glitches: Who summons up communications on a phone? (loc. 1287) Danielle's desire for giving Tony a 2nd chance (loc. 7462) seems highly unlikely — though, her extremely low self-esteem may account for that. However, the things she knew about Tony perhaps made her legally complicit in his crimes. Personally, I thought the silver, flashing, sardine-sized creatures were an odd addition. While those things keep me from giving this 5 stars, they really didn't detract from the compelling nature of the story.

There were shortcomings in the Kindle edition — enabling the X-ray function would have been nice; including real page numbers would have been nice; calling up the menu, tapping "Go To", and selecting "Beginning" took me to location 7635 which is the "about the author" page. However, all of those may be corrected in the actual retail edition of the book — my copy is a review copy straight from the publisher.

Disclosure: I received this book free from the publisher's BookSneeze blogger review program in exchange for a review of the book. I was free to write a review that truly reflects my views of the book. There has been no other compensation.