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The Return of Captain Bo I met John Bloomfield at the Miami Boat Show. He's a sharp guy, and he talks much faster than you'd expect someone with a Southern accent to talk. Before I could say, "It's nice to meet you," he was in and out of our booth. He signed copies of his book for Toni and me, leaving us with an apology about one of his characters. He repeated the same thing to me on the phone a few days later. "Listen," he said. "I know that as soon as you start reading the book you're going to want to throw it across the room, because there's this character in the first couple of pages who's this big-breasted gold-digging boat bimbo with the brains of a conch. But just promise me you'll keep reading." "Okay," I said, thinking I'll try... |
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It took me a little while to pick up Flip Flop. I had excuses, like finishing and defending my thesis, which I promptly fed to Mr. Bloomfield each time he called. And he called about once a week. Finally I decided that I'd better read it. For one thing, I admired his persistence. For another, I knew the book had been around for awhile. As a matter of fact, I remembered seeing it in Bluewater years ago. We had a record for it in our inventory system, so I wondered why we had stopped carrying it. I'd also seen it in other places—on friends' boats, in bait shops up and down the East Coast and in the Bahamas, and I was starting to feel guilty for making excuses. When I started reading it, I felt even guiltier. I liked it. I didn't want to put it down. I took it with me to the laundromat, read it in bed, and finished reading it last weekend while I was sitting in the cockpit of my boat drinking a rum drink and soaking in the sun. And I never wanted to throw it across the deck, even though the character in question seemed, in the beginning, to be so stupid that she couldn't even put her flip flops on the right feet. She was also troubled, interesting, sexy, and real. I liked her, because she reminded me of a lot of people that you meet in the fishing and boating world. She was what writers call a round character (and "round" doesn't have anything to do with the shape of her body...), as opposed to a flat character (one who goes through an entire book without changing.) The protagonist, Captain Bo, is also a round character. The book starts with Darcy, the "bimbo," jumping ship in Harbor Island, off of Eluthera. Darcy has escaped Fort Lauderdale on a sailboat, where she is supposed to be the nanny for the owner's kids. But she doesn't like making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, so she leaves in a stream of bad language. Darcy can cuss better than any fisherman I've ever heard. She lands aboard Captain Bo's charter boat, the Full Bloom. With Bo, Bulldog (who's very well-rounded...in the physical sense) and a scientist named Atom, Darcy discovers something that has the power to change all of their lives. If you took the book and picked it apart in a writing workshop, you'd be hard pressed to find something wrong with it. The plot is slightly absurd, but that's a compliment. It comes together beautifully. If anything, I think the book could have been slightly longer. I would have liked to have been inside Darcy's head a little more. I emailed Mr. Bloomfield from home as soon as I finished reading it, to let him know that I didn't think Darcy was all that bad. |
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