The Glass Ocean

If you know me, you know I love history, especially the opulent time of the Gilded Age.  Although technically the Gilded Age stopped around 1900, the wealth and extravagance lasted into the 1910s and 1920s.  The Glass Ocean is a historical fiction book chronicling the final passage of the Lusitania, an ocean liner that was sunk by a German U-boat in 1915 during WWI.  

The Glass Ocean is written by three authors—Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White—and the story is told from three women’s perspectives.  Two of the women lived in 1915, Caroline a wealthy socialite and Tess a con woman, who were both on the Lusitania.  The third is Sarah, a historical writer in the modern day who is investigating a mysterious note left by her great-grandfather, a steward who died on the Lusitania.  Her research lead her to England and John Langford, a descendant of another Lusitania passenger who was the supposed sender of the mysterious snippet.  While John and Sarah try to piece together how their ancestors connect and why a coded message was safely sealed in a waterproof bag for a century, the reader is pushed back in time to see the events play out in real time.

If I had to classify this book, it’s historical fiction but also a mystery.  I liked figuring out the new pieces and realizing who people were in relation to the modern day research Sarah was doing, but the beginning and the end of the story was uneventfully slow.  It took me a while to swap to the different character’s perspectives and to be invested in their outcomes.  Once they made it onto the boat, the action and suspicions started picking up and made the book better.  But the ending seemed a little…up in the air?  Anticlimactic?  It was just missing something.

Overall, I’m glad I read it.  I’m also glad that I checked it out from the library instead of buying it.