Review: Tsunami Blue by Gayle Ann Williams

Gayle Ann Williams’s debut novel is an entertaining read, but it unfortunately suffers from stilted characterization and a weak ending.

I have to confess, I bounced back and forth between liking Blue, the main character, and being completely irritated by her. On one hand, she was raised by her Runner uncle–Runners are basically pirates, more on this later–and has lived alone since she was a young teenager. It makes sense that she’d talk to her dog as if he were human, and it makes sense that she would have become a tough person to both fight off the Runners and to survive the isolation of her life. On the other hand… I found her bad ass banter with both the love interest and with the Runners to be contrived and eyeroll-worthy.

The fact that the novel is written in first person didn’t really help me get past my annoyance with Blue’s dialogue–inner and spoken. For example, from page 27:

I twirled the knife into a blur, which was habit. . . . “Depending on what I hear,” I continued, “if I like your answers, I’ll decide if you live” –twirl– “Or die.” Twirl. Man, I’d just impressed myself with this knife act, set a new speed record, even. I was such a badass.

The book falls victim to telling-not-showing syndrome. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a book will be much better if the author shows you what she wants you to understand about her characters/world/plot. When the reader is told that the protagonist is a badass over and over and over, it just doesn’t have the same effect as being shown that Blue can, in fact, kick someone’s ass. We get to see her fighting the bad guys, but she’s constantly telling us how tough she is. I would have liked her much better if she’d stopped talking about it so much and just kicked ass.

Gabriel Black, on the other hand, just didn’t feel developed enough for me. He shows up, half-dead on Blue’s beach, and after she saves his life, he smolders at her, flirts with her, and acts generally dangerous. We get hints of his history throughout the book, particularly in his relationship with two orphaned boys, but I felt like he didn’t have much of a personality at all. He also seems to have a strange obsession with Blue that never quite made sense to me, but this might be because I do have a problem with the love-within-hours-of-meeting trope that’s so integral to a lot of romances.

The world itself and the overall concept of the book are very interesting to me. I like the idea of a world wracked by natural disasters and tsunamis so violent that they’ve reshaped the continents. However, my inner science nerd really wanted more about what was happening, and the explanation that’s given just didn’t satisfy me. However, I say this with the caveat that I like hard science fiction and I read a lot of nonfiction about geology, so I expected a lot more than the average reader will. I did have trouble believing, though, that every major city in the world has been wiped out by the waves. The waves reached Chicago? Denver? Moscow? Wow. Those were really some serious waves. The Runners reminded me really strongly of the Reavers from Firefly in that they’re big, scary, evil guys who rape, murder, and pillage (well, the Reavers didn’t pillage) their way through the islands that make up the world. Life in this world is dangerous, and that definitely comes across through the writing.

The ending, however, just didn’t satisfy me as much as I wanted it to. I won’t spoil it, but it just happened too easily for my taste. It was rather formulaic and would have benefited greatly either from more explanation or less happy-ending. Again, this is one of my issues with romance tropes–I’m not the biggest fan of the happy happy ending where everything bad is gone, blah blah blah, so if you’re a romance fan, your mileage may vary, but I just wished it had been a little more difficult for them.