Dear Beth O’Leary,
I’ve had a banger of a reading month. The three most recent reads for me have been 5 star/A category experiences – My Big Fat Fake Marriage by Charlotte Stein, Promise Me Sunshine by Cara Bastone, and this one.
Probably the premise is a little on the preposterous side. Possibly even leaning strongly toward unbelievable. I was telling my husband about it and he had some opinions (“the North Sea? the North Sea? In a houseboat?”). But (almost all) of me didn’t care. I just sat back and enjoyed the ride. For four fifths of the book I was deeply invested and fully engaged. I didn’t really love the last act conflict but I came to understand it. I liked the ending but was pining for just a little more detail.
Lexi Taylor is a 31-year-old bar manager in Gilmouth on the northeast coast of England. She has been helping her best friend Penny raise Mae (Penny’s daughter) who is now aged just over 4. Penny and Lexi were effectively raised as sisters and are very close. Lexi has put her life on hold for Mae and loves her just as much as any mother could.
Ezekiel (Zeke) Ravenhill is 23. His parents split up when he was young and his dad moved to a houseboat. The Merry Dormouse, moored at the Gilmouth marina. He and his elder brother and sister used to stay with their dad on the boat when they visited. Zeke always felt like he didn’t belong, he feels he’s not as smart as his siblings and doesn’t fit in with his family. It’s described in the book as
That certainty that there’s no way to make myself into the right shape to fit in.
In fact, for much of his life Zeke has believed his dad wasn’t his biological father and that may have been why their relationship was a bit fraught. Zeke’s dad died some years before and he inherited the houseboat. In anger and grief, Zeke sold the boat but he’s recently bought it back, thinking that he might glean something about his dad if he returns to the boat. Besides, his dad was into puzzles and hidey-holes so there may actually be real information still on the boat that will answer Zeke’s questions. Following his father’s death, Zeke ran from his grief and used sex and alcohol (but mostly sex – there were a lot of one-night stands) to hide from his feelings. He started therapy a few months before and stopped his relentless pursuit of pleasure and escape. He created some rules for himself about when and with whom he’d have sex in the future and for the past eight months or so he’s kept to them.
In town to finalise his purchase of the Dormouse, Zeke stops in at the only pub in town and ends up breaking his rules and hooking up with Lexi, who is feeling a bit sorry for herself because of a recent argument with Penny.
You can tell she’s complicated.
I am such a sucker for complicated.
“I can’t believe we’ve agreed to spend the night together before we’ve even kissed,” she says, eyeing me. “This is extremely out of character for me, just so you know.”
“Is that what kissing is, for you?” I say, amused. “Like an audition?”
The look she gives me says, Yeah, duh. What else could it be? And I think, OK, so someone’s never kissed you like you deserve to be kissed, then.
For reasons which actually do make sense in the story, when Zeke and Lexi go back to the boat and are told by the neighbour that the stern line tying the boat to the pontoon has snapped, they end up tying (another rope on) the boat to itself rather than to the mooring and, while they are having fantastic sex, the Dormouse drifts out past the sea wall and into the North Sea. The battery is flat, there is no fuel, there is no working radio, the fridge doesn’t work, nor does the shower (because of the flat battery). When Lexi and Zeke wake they find themselves drifting with the current, with no way to contact anyone (their phones have no signal) and no way to navigate.
I let out a slow, shaky breath and try experimentally turning the wheel. Nothing happens. I’ve never had a panic attack before, but I’ve seen people have them on the telly. Maybe I could give it a go. I have the vague sense that it would make me feel better, like the thought of throwing up when you’re nauseous.
The kind of houseboats I’m used to seeing are riverboats, flat and wide. The kind of houseboat the Dormouse must have been was more boat, less house I’m thinking. Typically, houseboats don’t go into the sea as far as I know, but plenty of people live on boats so, in my head, that’s the kind of houseboat in the book. The North Sea is not terribly hospitable and if I had’ve been inclined to care, perhaps I would have wondered at a largely flat ocean for days on end and t-shirt weather during the daylight hours. Certainly the first images that load on a Google search are much more in the vein of A Perfect Storm (even though that movie was set in the North Atlantic) – but I really wasn’t inclined to care.
“We’ll be OK,” Zeke says after a moment. “People survive at sea for ages just holding on to a plank or a floaty coconut or something.”
Zeke and Lexi have to survive together and it didn’t matter to me much how it came to be that they were stranded on a boat in the North Sea – they were and that was that. The couple have to work together, trust and rely on each other, through various challenges, including injuries, weather, water (not enough to drink, too much sea water inside the boat, too much sea water outside the boat and not enough land) and an encounter with an oil rig. It was entirely believable to me that this pair would fall in love in the forever kind of way, not just a “we were in a trauma together” kind of way that dies as soon as everyone’s safe at home.
There was wonderful humour, lots of conversation, lots of paying attention to one another and learning what made the other tick.
Her lips press together for a second, as though she’s irritated, but I reckon actually she’s pleased. I’m starting to think that reading Lexi is kind of like reading something in code. All the gestures the rest of us use mean something different for her. So far, I’ve figured out that when she does lift the corners of her mouth, it’s not a smile, it’s more like an eyebrow-raise. When she frowns, she’s not angry—she’s thinking. And when she avoids my eyes, I reckon it’s not because she doesn’t want to look at me. It’s because she doesn’t want me to see what’s in hers.
Early on, for very sensible reasons, the notion of further physical intimacy is taken off the table. Later on, when trust and feelings have more fully developed, things change. But at the start, they’re virtual strangers so Lexi goes through Zeke’s things to find out a little more about this guy she’s stranded with.
My heart does a little hiccup as I find his phone charger, curled in a neat nest of wire. My phone is still switched off; it looks so sad on the side table, black and dumb. There’s a spare pair of boxers in here, some tissues, gum, plus a pack of condoms I recognize, and another one—flavored. I tend to associate flavored condoms with teenagers, or, occasionally, with men who really want a blow job and have seriously misunderstood the reason they’re not getting one.
And through her own things to see whether there’s anything useful there
I stare down at the holdall. My makeup bag is in there—I’ve ignored it up until now, but maybe there’s something useful inside it that I’ve not considered. I unzip it, rifling through the concealer, foundation, blusher, brushes, mascara. Unless this tube of lipstick is one of those cool James Bond gadgets that turns into a helicopter or something, this is all totally redundant. I briefly despise myself for being a woman who packs three shades of foundation instead of useful things like tissues, or snacks, or a small inflatable dinghy.
Both quotes above are examples of the wonderful humour threaded throughout the story which helped to break the tension as their situation became more dire and told me things about each character.
The parts where Lexi and Zeke are on the boat were my favourite. The stakes were high and they had to fight and win together.
I’m not sure what I imagined the ending would be but it wasn’t quite what ended up happening. I didn’t quite buy that Lexi would believe Zeke would behave that way, given what they had been through together and what they had disclosed to one another. I did understand the conflict she faced but I didn’t quite buy her reaction to it.
I still had some questions at the end about Zeke and his dad. I guess there are some things that just are and you don’t necessarily know all the whys and hows of it.
The age gap between the couple didn’t bother me either. Zeke was an old soul kind of guy and Lexi had been kind of stuck, not really moving on because of her commitment to Mae and Penny, so they felt like they had similar maturity. Zeke didn’t come across as irresponsible or flighty. Probably before he had started therapy he would have but he’d been working on himself and was pretty self-aware. Still, he did struggle with the internalised belief he was stupid. Lexi was very good for him in pointing out all the ways he was extremely smart. They had to improvise and innovate on the ocean and they survived. They survived because they were at turns brave, clever, inventive and resilient. Both of them were forever changed by the experience but the raw materials were always there.
“Everything you’ve told me about your life,” she says, “it doesn’t sound like you let people down. It sounds like you’ve not found people who make you feel like you’re enough.”
Posssibly the North Sea doesn’t often look like the picture on the cover (Google tells me it does at least sometimes) but you know what? I don’t even care!
I loved this book. I think it might be even better than The Flatshare. Beth O’Leary has become an auto-read for me and Swept Away is an example of why.
Related
Kaetrin
Kaetrin started reading romance as a teen and then took a long break, detouring into fantasy and thrillers. She returned to romance in 2008 and has been blogging since 2010. She reads contemporary, historical, a little paranormal, urban fantasy and romantic suspense, as well as erotic romance and more recently, new adult. She loves angsty books, funny books, long books and short books. The only thing mandatory is the HEA. Favourite authors include Mary Balogh, Susanna Kearsley, Joanna Bourne, Tammara Webber, Kristen Ashley, Shannon Stacey, Sarah Mayberry, JD Robb/Nora Roberts, KA Mitchell, Marie Sexton, Patricia Briggs, Ilona Andrews, just to name a few. You can find her on Twitter: @kaetrin67.
