The Ocean Above Me by Kevin Sites
Former war correspondent Lukas Landon is alone, trapped under 150-feet of water in an overturned shrimp trawler at the bottom of the ocean. The only thing keeping him alive is an air bubble in the ship’s bow. But the water level is rising, and time is running out. Landon doesn’t know if he will survive . . . or if he even deserves to. After years of covering bloody battles in Afghanistan and Iraq, Landon’s once promising life took a steep nosedive.
But he may have found a path to a series of in-depth stories on the Philomena, the rarest of South Carolina shrimp boats skippered by decorated former army sergeant Clarita Esteban. A Black woman struggling to survive in a white man’s world, Clarita has assembled a crew of misfits as deeply wounded as herself; a Cuban first mate who came to America during the Mariel boatlift and his troubled younger cousin; a quiet Haitian cook with a secret black book; a deckhand, the only member of the ship’s former crew willing to work for a Black female skipper; and Clarita’s daughter, who lost a college basketball scholarship to an injury.
As Landon slowly earns the disparate crew’s trust, uncovering their pasts—and how each landed aboard this rusty bucket of bolts with its own shaded history—he keeps his own story and the events that unmoored the foundation of his life a secret. But when catastrophe strikes—leaving him twenty-fathoms deep in exquisite isolation—Landon has no one to question but himself. Will he finally come clean? And if he does, will he make it out alive from this 110-ton steel tomb under the sea to finally tell the truth to those who need to hear it?
A thrilling fight for survival and a poignant story of loss and redemption, The Ocean Above Me is a literary masterpiece that explores the effects of trauma, the pain of forgiveness, and the light of love that burns in the darkest depths.
Review: I received a copy of this book from HarperCollins in exchange for an honest review.
Lukas Landon is a man haunted by his war journalist past, which led to the loss of his career path and marriage. Now, he is writing a series of stories from a shrimping boat off the coast of South Carolina, interviewing the crew members and capturing the stories. But his trip goes south when a storm sinks the ship and Lukas finds himself trapped in an air pocket in the ship under 150 feet of water.
As Lukas fights to survive in his isolated pocket of air, the story jumps back in time to tell the crew members' stories but also to slowly unfold Lukas's own life story and what brought him to this moment. Ultimately, this novel is about the immense will to live. In the depths of the sea, Lukas has a fighter's survival instinct and is extremely clear and levelheaded in his desperate bid to survive his ordeal.
The suspense in this novel is immense. The horror of imagining being trapped at the bottom of the ocean with only a tiny dwindling amount of air is horrifying to imagine. The novel is told in alternating chapters that jump back and forth between the beginning of the fishing trip and memories from earlier in Lukas's life. But the chapters that don't focus on the trapped man, even when they are stories about the crew members' horrific childhoods, cannot hold a candle to the horror and suspense of the underwater chapters. I believe the novel would have functioned better with a different layout, perhaps chronological so that the suspense could naturally build as the novel progressed, rather than being constantly punctuated by the end of a chapter.
Beneath the heart stopping suspense of this story, it truly is such a sad tale. Lukas has had such a traumatic life but so have the crew members. But for his war experiences that lead to him shutting down emotionally, Lukas would have never been on that boat and would have never experienced the terrible ordeal of days alone underwater.
Stars: 4
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