I wasn’t sure what to put this under, but I saw that another reviewer (Novel Novice) posted it under bildungsroman (that’s fancy for coming of age). I read this one a while ago, and have finally decided to add my two cents to the other reviews.

Sea is a story about a girl named Sienna. Sienna’s mother died a few years earlier in a plane crash. Since her mother’s accident, she has refused to go on an airplane and a part of her hasn’t healed yet. Her father is a psychologist with a humanitarian bent. The story is set shortly after the tsunami. Her father hands her a plane ticket for her birthday with the added bomb shell that they will be going to a remote village in Indonesia to help the kids there grieve after losing most of their family in the tsunami. After some drama, she acquiesces.  Once there, she meets Deni, a very handsome boy who makes her palms sweat.

Although this book has received glowing reviews, I will not be adding to the embers. This novel is Ms. Kling’s first attempt and I feel that she could have written a better novel. Parts of the book were so descriptive it read like a text book, other parts were glossed over. Near the climax of the novel Sienna chooses a path that I cannot believe she would choose. It felt as if Ms. Kling had wanted to take us to a certain part of Indonesia and couldn’t figure out how to get us there. The way the story panned out, didn’t make sense. I don’t want to say more because then I’d have to give a spoiler warning. I also felt that once Sienna falls hard for the handsome Deni, the story really just went off the rails. The rest of the story was spent thinking and obsessing about a boy, whom it was clear, she could never have a future with. If the author would have had Sienna meet and befriend a girl, she may have been able to more believably tell us about the plight of Indonesia after the tsunami. As it is, Sea is nothing more than the obsessions of a fickle, spoiled American girl in a far away country. Not really a book I would consider worth reading. That being said, you’d be hard pressed to find another bad review of this one.