Swan Song

April 1, 2020
A Vermont doctor takes a position aboard a cruise ship after the death of her partner. When we meet Jessie, she is grieving the recent deaths of her mother, her father, and her lover, and she is throwing her vibrator in the trash. Well, "you could hardly donate it to Goodwill for a tax deduction, or pass it down as an heirloom," and who knows when it will be her turn to die? She doesn't want her son finding it sitting alongside her VHS tape of Lesbian Hospital. Later that day, a woman's battered corpse floats up to Jessie's lakeside house. Enough is enough. With weak connections to her children and zero interest in "spending her twilight years baby-sitting" their offspring, she impulsively accepts a job as a cruise physician, offered by a doctor friend with whom she had an affair long ago. Despite her dour mood, he and others aboard the ship are interested in her--whether or not she will stop obsessively reading her dead lover's journal and accept these advances, or at least cheer up a little, is the main plot of the book. The most interesting character is a truly awful bitch, the former Miss Florida Power and Light, around whom sex and death promisingly swirl. But when the interesting questions raised in her plotline are left unanswered by the end of the cruise, the reader may be as dissatisfied as everyone else. After several mishaps, "the mood aboard the Amphitrite was glum....Those who were not complete sociopaths had realized that they had been born into Western democracies through no merit of their own. They had paid tens of thousands of dollars to ride this luxury liner, eating and drinking themselves into prediabetic stupors, while others rode capsizing ghost ships, drinking their own urine." Barring Titanic stories, this could be one of the most depressing books about a cruise ever written.

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April 20, 2020
Alther (Original Sins) strains for comic effect in her latest, a story about a latter-day ship of fools. Jessie Drake is a 60-something Vermont physician who gets over the death of her longtime lesbian partner, Kat, by taking a job as a doctor on a cruise ship. She is recruited by a former lover, Ben, the ship’s head doctor, who makes it clear that he still carries a torch for Jessie despite the fact that she is gay. Ben is soon sleeping with Mona, an opera singer who provides shipboard entertainment. When Jessie and Mona become friends, they form an extremely awkward triangle with Ben. Alther also casts an eye on fellow passenger Gail Savage, a former Miss Florida Power and Light, who carries on with a crew member right under the nose of her husband. Over the course of the voyage, Jessie has to contend with the death of one passenger, the disappearance of another, an attack by pirates, and the rescue of a boatload of refugees, all the while dealing with the nagging suspicion, gleaned from her late partner’s journal, that Kat might have been unfaithful. While the disparate plot elements don’t quite cohere amid the cartoonish set pieces, Alther makes Jessie a winning and funny travel companion
. Unfortunately, this voyage goes nowhere.

May 1, 2020
In the past two years, Dr. Jessie Drake has lost both her parents and, most crucially, her partner of two decades. Kat was a prolific writer, and as Jessie is left to ponder cryptic messages found in Kat's old journals and poems, she decides she must take a break from her now lonely routine to gain perspective. Through an old lover, Jessie accepts a stint as a ship's doctor on a cruise through the Far and Middle East. The change of scenery and the interactions with a diverse roster of passengers and staff help Jessie bring her grief into sharper focus. Often distracted by the nonsensical antics of her fellow shipmates, Jessie nevertheless manages to conduct a sobering analysis of her life with and without her beloved Kat. With classy cheek and sublime insight, ever-popular Alther presents a credibly touching portrait of a strong woman laid low by life's worst sorrow who examines the pitfalls of grief through a lens of self-doubt, yet who is tempered and buoyed by humor, and eventually resolves her despair through determined self-reflection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2020

After the death of her parents and longtime female lover Kat, 60-plus Dr. Jessie Drake accepts a job as assistant to a ship's doctor on a British liner cruising Asian and Middle Eastern waters and immediately falls into romance with the doctor (an old flame) and the ship's singer/entertainer. Plenty of crazy shipboard characters; from the author of Kinflicks.

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