Book Review of
The Glass Ocean

Lynn's Review

The Glass Ocean by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White was published in 2018. It is WWI Historical Fiction and has 403 pages.

The Glass Ocean has two timelines and follows three characters. 

In 2013, author Sarah Blake is trying hard to find the secrets that her great-grandfather’s old trunk holds. 

In 1915, Caroline Hochstetter and Tess Fairweather board the Lusitania. Their lives and story are intertwined in more ways than either of them know. 

I picked up this historical fiction book because I am trying to read more about the early 1900s and WWI. I have read so many books about WWII that I am trying to branch out and read more about the years before WWII. 

This book was a two-and-a-half to three-star read for me. 

I didn’t love it. The book is written by three authors and I could tell. I felt like I was reading three different writing styles. It wasn’t that I thought the writing was bad, it was that it did not flow well. It felt disjointed. Each character was well written, but the writing of each character did not seem to match the others 

The book was also a bit too pg-13 for me. I skimmed a few sections, which worked, but those descriptive scenes did not need to be there. The book could have implied what happened without going into a ton of detail. 

The book did make me want to read more about the Lusitania. Erik Larson’s book Dead Wake is in my to-be-read stack and after reading this book it is moving higher up the stack. I do appreciate it when a book inspires me to learn more, so I am glad this book did that, but it isn’t my favorite WWI historical fiction book.