Book Review: Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan

Awake in the Floating City is an atmospheric debut that explores a haunting, flooded San Francisco, art, and the act of caregiving.

Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan isn’t your typical dystopian story. It’s softer, slower, a meditation on grief, memory, and the small acts that tether us to the world when everything else has slipped away. Find out why I gave the book 3/5 stars.

What is the book about?

Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city and almost everyone else has fled. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge and ever since, Bo has been alone. She is stalled: an artist unable to make art, a daughter unable to give up the hope that her mother may still be alive. Half-heartedly, she allows her cousin to plan for her escape—but as the departure day approaches, she finds a note slipped under her door from Mia, an elderly woman who lives in her building and wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay.

Mia can be prickly, and yet still she and Bo forge a connection deeper than any Bo has had with a client. Mia shares stories of her life that pull Bo back toward art, toward the practice she thought she’d abandoned. Listening to Mia, allowing her memories to become entangled with Bo’s own, she’s struck by how much history will be lost as the city gives way to water. Then Mia’s health turns, and Bo determines to honor their disappearing world and this woman who’s brought her back to it, a project that teaches her the lessons that matter most: how to care, how to be present, how to commemorate a life and a place, soon to be lost forever. [Goodreads.com]

My thoughts:

Susanna Kwan drops us into a half-drowned San Francisco and somehow makes it feel both haunting and weirdly gorgeous. Her writing is so visual, I could practically see the water creeping up the buildings. I could hear that constant, bone-deep drizzle. At the center of it all is Bo—an artist who hasn’t made art in ages, a daughter still clinging to the hope that her mother might be alive somewhere out in the flooded mess.

Bo’s ready to escape with the rest of the sane people… until Mia slips a note under her door. Mia, the prickly older woman upstairs, needs a caregiver, and against her better judgment, Bo stays. Their relationship becomes the anchor of the story—unexpected, tender, and full of the kinds of moments that make you pay attention to your own life a little more closely. Through Mia’s stories, Bo reconnects with art and with the idea that creating something meaningful doesn’t require permanence. Sometimes it’s enough just to make it.

I loved the themes, the atmosphere, the whole “art-as-memory” thread running through the book. But the pacing is slow, like wading-through-water slow. If you’re in the mood for something meditative and reflective, it works. If you’re not, you might find yourself wishing for a bit more momentum.

Still, as a debut? Pretty impressive. I’ll absolutely check out whatever Kwan writes next.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an advanced reader’s copy; all opinions expressed in this review are my own.

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