The Unimaginable - Dina Silver

A beautiful cover and convenient timing left me in the mindset that The Unimaginable was going to be something like Station Eleven--not in topic, because the book summary made it very clear that this was nothing like Station Eleven, but for some reason I had it in my mind that this would have the same beautiful writing, construction, and love of life that Station Eleven contained.  Unfortunately, this was not the case.

The story is about Jessica Gregory, who moves to Thailand in the wake of her mother, who she never really got along with.  She has a job teaching English and gets another job at a bar.  After a few months of this she has three weeks of vacation and decides to look for an adventure by crewing on a boat for a long distance sail, despite having no sailing experience or really any sense in her head at all.  She also falls immediately and conveniently in love with a man almost twice her age who really doesn't want anything to do with her, but of course as soon as she bats her eyelashes at him he falls in love with her, too, despite being in mourning for his deceased wife, and takes her on as crew essentially so he can get around to boning her.  And then, of course, come the pirates.

The writing here is sloppy and the romance is eyeroll- and gag-worthy.  I am an avid reader of romance, but this is not good.  The chemistry is nonexistent, the sex scenes sloppy and deserving of nothing more than cringing.  Despite going into detail, it's ultimate unclear whether Jessica--our narrator--even gets to have a decent orgasm.  Poor thing.  The danger, despite being very real, is completely overblown.  And though the entire book builds up to it from a brief--very brief--prologue, it only lasts about fifteen pages and then is over, and the focus of the book is back to Jessica mooning over Grant, in a relationship that seemed more than a little skeevy to me, mainly because Grant just kept putting Jessica off and wouldn't emotionally commit to her, even for a little bit, but was perfectly willing to fuck her all the way across the Indian Ocean.  Ew.

This is also one of those books where the heroine, despite wanting adventure in the great wide somewhere a la Belle, promptly gives up everything when she meets the hero.  This bothers me in any context, but in contemporary books more than in historical ones, because in times like the Regency era women were taught not to have expectations or dreams and, if they did, to give them up to men.  A modern woman should know better than this.  If what Jessica had wanted was to be a wife and nothing else, then fine--that's a woman's prerogative.  But to claim she wanted adventure and to teach and see the world and not be one of the women from her hometown who just got married and gave up on life, and then to immediately abandon everything in favor of mooning over a guy who has literally said three sentences to her.

The pacing is also awful, and the writing itself is terrible.  It's full of sentences like, "And the, on the Imagine, came...the unimaginable.  You can just tell that Silver wants us to gasp and clutch our pearls and be so dismayed by the drama, but I really didn't care about any of the characters and so this ploy was completely unsuccessful.  There is only one remotely dismaying thing that happens in the book, and it has nothing to do with Jessica or Grant.

There is an author's note at the end of the book about where the story--and all of the character names--came from.  While the origins are remarkable, tragic, and worthy of their own story, this particular story did not do them justice, not in any way.  I would not recommend this, nor will I be picking up anything else by this author in the future.

1.5 stars out of 5, and that's only for the setting.