It's the yearly fan reunion of the Sonata, the ship used in the popular eighties’ television series Starlight Voyages. Many of the show's actors are on board for this cruise to Bermuda, and Doug, "the bartender," is joining them this time, as his other money-making ventures didn't materialize. Doug and the rest of the cast partied hard in the show's heyday, causing him to lose friends and family, but he has gotten sober and hopes to make amends while he still can. He brought his teen nephew as his plus one and looks forward to a relaxing time with his nephew and without too many responsibilities to the passengers/fans. He has misread the situation.
Franny, the Korean wife of a prestigious white lawyer, brought her family along on the cruise to celebrate her mother’s seventieth birthday. In Korean tradition, a parent’s seventieth is an extremely important event, celebrated with precisely made foods, flowers, and, above all, reverence. Franny is doing the best she can for her oblivious parent, who has spent her years catering to others at the restaurant she owned-she wants to do right by her mother, and perhaps have her mother finally acknowledge her. But she has some other unresolved issues of her own.
Instead of prepping for the job interviews that Lucy has lined up, she uncharacteristically decides to join her roommate’s offer of a free cruise. Lucy is graduating from MIT with an engineering degree and her work on data mining is attracting a lot of interest from lucrative companies-and even that upstart, Google. What most people don’t know about her is that she earned a double major-one in engineering and one in art. As her father keeps telling her, she has the capability to become very well off as long as she drops her dream of creating beauty, and as a rule, museums don’t feature female black artists. She has a lot to think through.
All these problems are exacerbated by the fact that the ship’s cruise is dated September 16, 2001-a week after the tragedy of September 11th. It is the duty of Sonata’s crew and the ship’s entertainers to show their passengers a wonderful time and make them forget what’s going on back home. Could that be the reason that phones and laptops have no WIFI?
Everyone has seen The Love Boat, the program on which this novel is based. The author does a great job of channeling the show, especially using its format of three stories as the frame for the book’s structure. However, while the TV plots are always resolved before the passengers leave the ship, dilemmas in the book are left open-ended, giving the reader room to keep wrestling with the characters’ problems long after the concluding sentence.
Reviewed by Donna Ballard
March 10, 2026
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