Awake in the Floating City is a slow read about human connection and relationships in the midst of a climate-changed dystopia. Bo, our main character, lives in San Francisco, a city flooding more and more each day. Just as she is about to leave, she receives a request from her elderly neighbor, Mia, to become her caretaker. The story really begins here, as it is more about the relationship between Bo and Mia than the dystopian world they live in. I'd recommend for fans of deep, slow moving books focused on the human condition.

Almost all of Bo's whole family is leaving town or has already gone, and she is supposed to be leaving with the last of her relatives, fleeing a submerged future San Francisco and heading to Canada to build a new, drier life for themselves. Bo is an artist, but to pay the bills she also does supportive care for elderly clients, and a new job offer shows up to work for a woman in her building who is about 130 years old, just as she is about to leave town. And, while she cannot talk about it to anyone apparently, Bo has her own reasons to want to stay.

This is a great story about grief, death, loss, and how people recover from the major crises in their lives. It requires suspension of disbelief to buy into the setting, since many modern cities exist in very wet, humid places, and do not just rot and crumble because it rains a lot. And, at the rate that people can build things now, it is hard to imagine a major California city not just building on the new coastal lands as the coast shifts. The story requires this sort of abandoned, half-drowned cityscape, but it seemed overly contrived. And, most ecology scientists I know would be swarming all over the drowned city studying and measuring everything, so the one lone ecologist bravely gathering data after everyone else has left is also unrealistic. Scientists use boats, off-road vehicles, and backcountry gear to get to all the inhospitable places on Earth and in space, so a half drowned city would be no serious obstacle, just an opportunity to study a new modern ecosystem. So, this book has a few issues, but none that can't be ignored to enjoy the story. I'd give this book 4.5 stars but here a 5 is appropriate.
Good book, worth reading, and I could see it deserving recognition for book prizes, even if it gets a few things a bit wrong.

I wish I felt what this book wanted me to feel. The writing is incredibly detailed and sensory, and yet the atmosphere feels vague. Rather than feeling immersive, the whole thing felt long-winded and sluggish--much longer than its 300ish pages.

I wish, I wish, I wish. I'll keep an eye out for this author in the future, but this one just didn't work for me.

I did not finish this book, so this is a placeholder rating (unable to share without adding a rating). I was super excited by the premise of this book, climate/eco fiction are fascinating to me. Unfortunately I got ~50 pages in and was just not pulled in. I found myself not wanting to pick the book up. Others said it started slow, and to push through, so I may give it another shot down the line.

Thank you nonetheless for the eARC!

Climate change has taken its toll. San Francisco has become a “floating city”. Most people have left and it is time to move on if you haven’t already. But many remain, roof tops have become the new “streets”. Bo, an artist whose side gig is working as a caretaker. Bo is stuck, since the disappearance of her mother in a flash flood she hasn’t been able to paint. Her cousin wants her to leave the city but somehow she can’t. Then a note shows up offering her a caretaker job for an old woman, Mia, in her building. Taking this job is her excuse for staying on. Bo and Mia become the center of the story along with San Francisco and its Chinese community. As the layers of each of their lives are revealed Bo begins to create. It is a slow read but insightful in what it means to have a life, a past, to be forgotten, to have a connection to a place and history.

Awake in the Floating City takes place in a dystopian setting where the city of San Francisco has been flooded by constant rainfall. Our main character, Bo, becomes caretaker for an elderly woman named Mia who ends up really helping Bo and in many ways, becomes a caretaker for Bo as well. Mia helps Bo see that there is much more to life by sharing her own life stories with her that give Bo inspiration and hope. This was a very heartwarming story about the complexity of relationships and the magic of multigenerational connections.
I would recommend this book for those who are looking for a slow-paced, thought provoking read that is sure to shed a tear or two.

This is a beautifully written story of a possible future after climate disasters and flooding overcome San Francisco. It took a little while to get into the rhythm of the story. Once I was drawn in, however, the characters were moving. This story offers a unique commentary on home and history. I loved being in Bo's perspective as she grapples with loss and life through the lens on an artist and caregiver. It was really nice to read a story with a home care giver as the main character. I will carefully follow whatever Susanna Kwan does in the future. I strongly recommend this to anyone who enjoys a slower paced story full of emotional depth.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf Pantheon for providing an eARC in return for my honest thoughts.

Awake in the Floating City may be something most readers won’t expect. The dystopian setting is but that while the real focus of the story is human connection.

To me, the question at the core of this book felt like this - to whom do we owe our loyalty? In an increasingly difficult world to survive in, our main character Bo has to choose what she owes to her family, to the vulnerable and, ultimately, to herself. Although I, as the reader, was frustrated with her decisions, this may well have been the point of the book - they were hers to make.

A beautiful story that caught me off guard.

It has been raining for 7 years. It is impossible to get around and residents are either trapped on high floors or have fled. Water is everywhere as is the decimation.
But Bo is loathe to leave. After her mother is swept away by the waters, an elderly neighbor in her building , trapped on a high floor, asks her to be her caretaker and helper. It turns out to be a good arrangement for both of them. After all the years of rain, flash floods impossible flooding,, and utter destruction, will helping another person help Bo survive this? Mia is no wilting flower either. She needs the help but she has a difficult side too. She has a daughter who has her own life and hasn't seen her mother in a very long time, but she calls.
Loneliness vs connection, friends, and the rare person who cares, can change the spirit from darkness to living again. Her budding relationship with Mia is opening the door to friendship, something we all felt during Covid's lockdowns when we felt isolated too. .
Being a caretaker means that Bo is relevant again, and to accomplish that , while helping an elderly person, is selfless and precious. It is helping her to find meaning in life, and come back to living her life after the disappearance of her mom.
Bo has started to paint again after the flooding, devastation separation loss and isolation..
At times, the story seems to slow down, and given the situation, it seems very natural. Bo actually takes on an art project and struggles to find inspiration.
While I was reading, it struck me that the environment is an important element in our own lives, and we need to take better care ofnit. Could the water have been mitigated by preparing better? I had to take a break.
This book made me think, reflect, and pause on climate change, pollution, and water everywhere in a world that had not been cared for and spun away too quickly. It also highlighted the human spirit which teaches us the possibility of our own unknown strengths. The writing was pretty in the midst of the bleak surroundings
Bo deserved so much more.

Thanks to the author and the publisher for the ARC copy. All opinions are my own.

This is a quieter story. It's beautifully written, but it was not a page turner to me. I was in awe of the author's writing ability and style, though.

A thought provoking book with characters that stay with you long after the book is over. A dystopian world with beauty and heart.

I will say this was beautifully written. However, it's very slow, not much happens, and I really didn't care for any of the characters - they felt flat and unlikeable. It just didn't do much for me. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon for the ARC.

A huge thank you to Pantheon books and NetGalley for my ARC!

This scratched my dystopian book guys. I really really enjoyed this rather succinct book about climate change happening in the near future and the impacts it had on San Francisco- from everyday people, healthcare, subsistence, archives, and art.

The story follows Bo, who is trying to reconcile staying in an area where storms get more and more brutal and care take for an elderly lady named Mia whose life is full of history. Bo has an opportunity to leave the collapsing San Francisco and join her family in a more inland area- but Bo cannot seem to let go of the memory of her mother and leave Mia behind.

This was a beautifully done story- from the writing, to the plot, to also the writer's ability to have characters make life beautiful even in the face of climate change. I really loved the tribute to what our future could be and would recommend this.

The only content was some language and open door/affairs.

"Her own searching returned to her now in surges, those hopeless, hopeful days, streets churning with water, the ocean everywhere. She'd never stop, she wouldn't; a memory couldn't be drowned."

Set in approximately 2050 in a flooded San Francisco, Bo, a caregiver for the elderly, and Mia, a supercentenarian who's without family in the area, form an unexpectedly close friendship in their city surrounded by water.

Torn between her desire to stay in the city where she was raised, where she lost her mom in a large flood, and leaving at the urgency of her family, Bo has made a living out of caring for the elderly. In a city now of rooftops rather than streets, of boats and skywalks rather than cars and bridges, there are many elderly in the city, some refusing to go and some with no where to turn. But Bo's desire to stay, outweighs her desire to do as her own family says. For many years, Bo struggled as an artist, but with the changing city around her and the loss of her mother, she's drifted away from art and is focused instead on simply surviving.

Mia, about to celebrate her 130th birthday, is a little grumbly but more than a little lonely. Having Bo suddenly in her life has made her start to cautiously open up. And Bo listens with increasing dedication as Mia shares long stretches of her personal history. What springs up between them is the kind of closeness that could only have come at the end for Mia — whose life has been long but was often difficult.

Kwan has penned a stunningly beautiful and measured debut. She weaves Mia's memories into a tapestry of what Bo knows about the city and its rich history, and has Bo stitch in her own experiences alongside. Bo finds dawning inspiration in Mia's story and begins work on an art project to honor this remarkable woman and the extraordinary life she's lived, bringing her own self back into the light of life in the process.

This novel makes you think of climate fiction but it is much more. The book is about caring for another person and being a caregiver. The rooftop dwelling seemed secondary to the caregiver and artist theme within the book. The author caught the relationship well between caregiver and patient. I found that story very compelling. While becoming a caretaker was about taking care of the patient it was also about self healing.

The world that Kwan created on the rooftops seemed a reasonable adaptation to life in a water filled world. I enjoyed that part without it being a doomsday novel. It helped make the novel something I wanted to continue to read. I thought it was creative.

While we get to know the characters we also learn a lot about the history of San Francisco. I applaud how the author wove that into the book without it feeling like historical fiction. I enjoyed this novel and look forward to more by the author. Thank you Netgalley for the chance to review this novel.

Gorgeously written, but with a slow start. I understand the build up needed for a work like this, but I still struggled to get into it initially. However, by the end, I was totally engrossed.

The imagination required for this was next level - but also not (climate change is real real, you know)? Bo was a mostly likeable character - she had her pitfalls but as I came to know her throughout the chapters, she grew on me. I feel that in talking too much about the plot of this book, I’m going to give too much away, so I will leave it at that.

Overall, a fascinating science fiction tale that is deeply emotionally rooted in relationships and shared history.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a digital ARC of this title!

3.5, rounded up. This is the second literary novel about a near-future drowning American city I've read this year, after Tea Obreht's magic-realist The Morningside. Susanna Kwan takes an entirely different tack, submerging the mid-20th-century Chinese-American immigrant experience beneath the climate apocalypse of the mid-21st century.

Bo, a blocked visual artist, mourning the recent unresolved loss of her mother, takes a job as a home healthcare aide for Mia, a 130-year-old woman whose narcissistic daughter has abandoned her. No surprises here that the two of them form a temporary family, as Mia shares her recollections of her deep and rich life experiences, which take her from a village in wartime Guangdong to Hong Kong to postwar Chinatown and the Outer Sunset. Meanwhile, Bo rekindles her passion for art-making by using drones and holograms to project a memorial to Mia, using skyscrapers as screens.

Oddly, it's the futuristic narrative of submerged high-rises in a depopulated San Francisco that seems more lived-in and realistically-rendered than the well-researched archival historical reconstructions (perhaps that was Kwan's point all along). The main characters are complex and thorny, and their moving moments of connection felt earned, but the secondary characters (mostly male) were flatly-drawn. Kwan's prose is elegant and poetic, but that didn't fully compensate for narrative problems with pacing and longueurs, and mechanical plot complications.

<i>Thanks to Netgalley and Pantheon for providing an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.</i>

3.75⭐️
If you’re looking for a dystopian novel about the effects of climate change on the world, this really isn’t it. That’s the most upsetting thing about this book. The synopsis is slightly misleading. Does that mean you shouldn’t read it? Absolutely not. This is the excellent character study of family dynamics and of found family. I really enjoyed how Kwan set up this dystopian world where it has been raining for so long, people have created markets and communities on roofs, where boats are the common form of transportation, and people are struggling to escape to dryer climates. I also found the idea of people being able to live twice as long an interesting plot point to add. I’m not sure it really made sense, it felt sort of out of place, but the author did take a realistic approach to how that would affect family dynamics. And Kwan’s writing is beautiful. When it came to the setting, Kwan excellently portrays the water logged landscape and the way people adapted and adjusted. It was easy to visualize.

I did struggle with the relationship between Bo and Mia. As the book progressed I really struggled feeling that their relationship was anything special or important. I never really felt like it was that great of a relationship. Mia seemed completely dependent on Bo but also seemed mostly bothered by her. Bo seemed more obsessed about her art than about Mia. The relationship Bo had with Eddie was beautiful and I felt the love they had for each other within those chapters, but that was completely lacking with Bo and Mia. I also enjoyed the relationship between Mia and Beverly and Bo and Beverly.

That was another part that was confusing: Bo’s art. I had a really hard time visualizing what Bo was doing, how she was doing it, and what the final product ultimately was. I feel like that was unnecessarily complicated and almost required a knowledge of art I just didn’t have.

I would probably recommend this book, especially for those that enjoy character based books, but I would definitely consider reading more from this author in the future.

***Thank you NetGalley, Susanna Kwan, and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review. ***

I really really enjoyed this one. It was slow, but if you take your time and read a little at a time, you can really immerse yourself in it.

It’s clear the author is also an artist, and I loved the way Mia helped Bo find passion in her art again. I do think if you’re going into this expecting a dystopian / sci-fi story, you’ll be disappointed. It is definitely more literary fiction and character driven, but if you like those type of stories this is a good one!

Awake in the Floating City is set in the future in San Francisco, where climate change has made the city almost unlivable and there are very few people left. Interestingly, I also read "All the Water in the World" earlier this year, and thought this sounded very similar, but they are quite different books. Awake is less dystopian, there is still housing, jobs, technology, etc., but there is a general feeling throughout the book that time is running out. The book focuses on Bo and her relationship with Mia, to whom she is a caretaker, and to her art, which has been stalled but then gets reinspired. The book can be a little slow at times, but it is well written and powerful.