The Floating Feldmans by Elyssa Friedland

Lynnie

contemporary fiction

When the matriarch of a dysfunctional family decides to book a cruise for all of them on her seventieth birthday, what did she expect would happen?  Spoiler alert: they did not sit around all day drinking rum punch and singing kumbaya.  

Elyssa Friedland does not like cruises. That one fact is perfectly clear as you read this book- in her mind they are cramped, overcrowded, focused entirely around food, but the food is somehow difficult to get with all the people always wanting it. Gross.

Worse, however, Friedland doesn't seem to like her own characters which makes it really hard for a reader to like them. The Floating Feldmans are a dysfunctional family, full of secrets, unable to communicate with one another like grown-ups, and usually with one ulterior motive or another. The most likable characters are Freddy and Natasha (the black sheep of the family and his stereotypical young girlfriend) and Darius, the teenage son of Freddy's sister who is really just trying to keep his head down and survive high school; we don't get enough of any of those three. I was constantly distracted by the fact that author Elyssa Friedland named one of her main characters "Elise Feldman" though I don't know why- maybe it just felt like a lack of imagination.

The book simply never grabbed me- the writing was dreadfully dull and so full of the characters' inner-monologues that I eventually found myself skimming through the book looking for actual dialogue. Typically, characters would start a conversation, have four pages of inner monologue, and then jump back into the conversation long after I'd forgotten what it was about. There was also one character, the cruise director, who served no purpose whatsoever. If his character had been written out entirely I don't think it would have made a bit of difference.

So, I can't recommend this book. Clearly, according to Goodreads, lots of people love it, but I am not those people. It was very close to being a DNF for me several times and it probably should have been.