Collision | 
pickThe convergence in the Mediterranean of a massive luxury cruise ship, a small, decrepit tramp cargo ship, and a rubber zodiac overloaded with refugees from North Africa. Right away, I felt the writing was cinematic, and it turns out that the author is a filmaker and the story is based on real events she made a documentary about. It‘s not the best writing, and sometimes too much is attempted as we are presented with a melange of characters..(seeđź‘Ž)
arubabookwoman and their stories on all three vessels. The stories of the crew and staff on the cruise ship and what goes on in the underbelly of such vessels were eye-opening. A pick because the subject was interesting. The writing only so-so. 6y
Graywacke Maybe documentary was better? 6y
arubabookwoman @Graywacke I don‘t think she could overcome her documentarian background. She frequently wandered off into encyclopedia like descriptions that really didn‘t fit in fiction. Examples: the cargo ship is coming from Algeria. She goes on, “Algeria (Arabic al-Jaza‘ir), officially the People‘s Democratic Republic of Algeria, is the largest country on the African continent. The majority of the population lives in northern Algeria, which is where the👎🏻 6y
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arubabookwoman Tell Atlas is located. The larger southern region is uninhabited, dominated as it is by the desert regions of the Sahara. Gas, though, lies under the sand.” There are at least half a dozen passages like this-1 of the characters is from Odessa, so there is a long passage about the battleship 6y
arubabookwoman Potemkin, the movie by Eisenstein, it‘s 1925 premiere, Odessa‘s founding by Catherine the Great (the only female ruler to be given the epithet “the great,”), etc; another character is a cook so she gives a lot of factoids about a Roman sauce made from fermented mackerel which led to the naming of a Spanish town. It was always jarring and took me out of the story. 6y
Graywacke @arubabookwoman kind of funny. Couldn‘t let go of the info dump. 6y
Cinfhen Does sound like an interesting story, though 6y
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