Review: Trish Doller's FLOAT PLAN.

Thanks to the publisher & Netgalley for the complimentary ARC. All opinions are my own.

Q: are you/could you be a light packer?

If a hard-hitting romance with a heroine who must find what happiness looks like on the other side of loss + a charming Irish hero on a captivating sailboat journey sounds like your cup of tea then I definitely recommend Trish Doller’s Float Plan.

Anna Beck’s beloved fiancé Ben committed suicide nearly one year before & she’s been in a fog of grief since. When she receives a reminder that they’re supposed to leave on the sailing expedition he planned, she quickly leaves by herself without telling her best friend or family or quitting her job.

Also without having totally mastered learning sailing a boat on her own.

A scare on the first leg of the journey convinces her she needs help & she enlists Keane Sullivan, Irish rogue & all around sweetheart. As Keane tells her in one moment, he’s had to learn to live with loss, too, after his leg was amputated & his professional sailing dreams were threatened...if not destroyed altogether.

Anna & Keane will journey to Puerto Rico together & then she’ll continue without him to Trinidad. Only things don’t really work out as planned.

With outstanding, vibrant descriptions of sailing, the places Anna & Keane travel to, & the people they encounter, Float Plan feels like an adventure. The storytelling is fine, the voices wiggled their ways into my heart, & the friends to lovers slow burn tale is so moving—though I did feel like things get a little anticlimactic toward the end. Temporarily.

While Keane is a stud, without question the real standout for me is Anna, who makes the decision to leave everything she’s ever known & along the way learns how capable she really is & what the world looks like—what her life can look like—from the tiller of her boat.


TW:

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Anna’s fiancé Ben committed suicide before the book begins but she flashbacks to finding his body. Second, there’s an uncomfortable moment for me when Keane segues from his discussion of a series of statues honoring slaves who died off Martinique to “honor[jng] the memory of those we’ve lost”—in her case Ben. I found the suggestion of comparison somewhat unsettling.

4.5 ⭐️. Float Plan publishes on 03/02.