Manhattan Beach

I'm going to have a hard time explaining exactly why I didn't like this without filling my review with spoilers, but I'm going to try my hardest.

There is a part of this book that is great. It's the part where Anna, the protagonist, is trying to break into a man's world as a woman and become a diver. That's the good part of the book: Anna's professional life. It's compelling enough that I wound up finishing this book instead of putting it the DNF pile.

The part I disliked was literally everything else. Everything about Anna's personal life is a mess, and not in a good way. The most egregious part of the story is chock-full of spoilers but I will just say this: if you care one whit about disabled people, you want to skip this book. It's callous in the way it handles its disabled character, and at one point even uses the memory of a hope of what the disabled character could have been had she only been able-bodied to motivate Anna to make a major choice in her own life.

Overall, the book was a massive disappointment, as there was an interesting story buried in it, surrounded by things that ranged from bad to worse to offensive. I would not recommend this to anyone.