The Last Cruise

By Kate Christensen 
Published July 10 2018 by Doubleday 
🌟🌟🌟⭐

3.5 stars rounded up.

If you have no desire at all to ever embark on a cruise ship, this book will reaffirm that notion.  If you have cruised and want to go again, you may change your mind after reading this book.  I am firmly in the first category since I suffer from motion sickness.  Now I also suffer from fear of being stranded in the middle of the ocean with no power, no crew, diminishing food supply, and a chance of rain.  For these passengers on the final voyage of The Isabella, at least there was plenty of wine and whiskey.  

The Isabella is being decommissioned or whatever you call it, and this one last voyage from California to Hawaii will be reminiscent of the good old days, in both music and food.  We get to know the musical quartet, from Israel, and one of the chefs, Hungarian, plus a couple of the passengers, Valerie and Christine.  The crew has discovered that they're  all being fired by the cruiseline once in Hawaii, and it's  not going over well.  Valerie is there to write about the dynamics of a crew made up of diverse cultures and their treatment by corporate, and then her story turns into something much larger in scale when the crew quits.  Christine is the light of their cruiseship lives, but she doesn't know if her own life, her marriage to a farmer, is what she wants.

So much going on here yet I had no problem keeping up with all the names and places.  The ending might make you angry or sad or confused, depending on how you take it.  My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley.