Awake in the Floating City

A Novel

By: Susanna Kwan

Narrated by: Catherine Ho

WINNER OF THE ASIAN AMERICAN AWARD FOR LITERATURE IN ADULT FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE

An utterly transporting debut novel about the unexpected relationship between an artist and the 130-year-old woman she cares for—two of the last people living in a flooded San Francisco of the future, the home neither is ready to leave.

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FROM PEOPLE MAGAZINE

"An astonishing work of art...This is the kind of book that changes you, that leaves you seeing more vividly, and living more fully, in its wake." —Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans

Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city and almost everyone else has fled. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge and ever since, Bo has been alone. She is stalled: an artist unable to make art, a daughter unable to give up the hope that her mother may still be alive. Half-heartedly, she allows her cousin to plan for her escape—but as the departure day approaches, she finds a note slipped under her door from Mia, an elderly woman who lives in her building and wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay.

Mia can be prickly, and yet still she and Bo forge a connection deeper than any Bo has had with a client. Mia shares stories of her life that pull Bo back toward art, toward the practice she thought she’d abandoned. Listening to Mia, allowing her memories to become entangled with Bo’s own, she’s struck by how much history will be lost as the city gives way to water. Then Mia’s health turns, and Bo determines to honor their disappearing world and this woman who’s brought her back to it, a project that teaches her the lessons that matter most: how to care, how to be present, how to commemorate a life and a place, soon to be lost forever.

The tension that builds to complete Bo’s Art

I liked that this book was completed by one of my favorite authors Susanna
Kwan 🥰❤️😘

Beautiful and hopeful story

This is a very graceful book that imagines our climate future with care and hope. I loved her homage to libraries, archives, and librarians.

slow and dull

Admittedly, I only read half the book, which is exceedingly rare. I'm ok with a slow burn but this is toooo slow. The main charachter is stuck and depressed herself in a stuck and depressed situation. But oddly enough, the depth of that parallel is an opportunity missed by the author. The story meanders between history of the city (better done by other historical fiction) and roots in China (also better done by a slew of other authors) and a dystopian San Francisco. Somehow there have been rains for seven years in SF, but Vancouver is OK? Where's the science and geography in that? And even most earthquake resistant buildings would be washed away in seven years of tides and surges. And the garbage, carcasses, and mold etc. would make the area untenable.
I could never care about the main character, and only cared about her patient slightly more.
The narrator has a monotone with sibilance, but speeding it up helped a bit.

Catherine Ho is my least favorite audio performer

She can ruin any book. For dialogue, she voices Mia like a loud, obnoxious man. For Bo, her voice is 50% quieter but is at least voiced ok. And then there's the bulk of the narration, in a breathy, soft, little girl voice. So she goes on my list of 2 female narrators I will never listen to again.

As for the story...well, I liked it well enough. I think had it not been for the cli-fi aspect, I would have been bored about half the time. Essentially this is a story about a younger women (Bo) who is a home health aid and takes care of Mia, who tells Bo (an artist who is so annoyingly hapless I couldn't stand it) the story of her life as she declines. If you stripped out anything dystopian, speculative, futuristic, cli-fi, the author wouldn't have to revise much. But I suppose it was what kept me hanging in there--and that it takes place in San Francisco and that the characters are Chinese added interest.

As usual, these days, I felt like this was way too long for what it was.