Tropical Depression [Paperback]

Arin Greenwood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2011

Nina Barker is a neurotic young New York lawyer whose life is coming apart. After suffering a lost job and a bad breakup, she flees the increasingly painful world she knows in favor of what she imagines - quite wrongly, it turns out - will be a simpler life on the remote island of Miramar. Populated with corrupt politicians, quirky and frequently intoxicated expats, ghosts, strippers, and a guy who may or may not be working for the CIA, Nina soon discovers her tropical escape isn't exactly paradise - it's also not boring. Sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious, Tropical Depression explores what happens when a person finds the change, adventure, and CIA agents she wasn't looking for.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Back Porch Books; 1ST edition (January 1, 2011)
• ISBN-10: 0615431887
• ISBN-13: 978-0615431888
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 4.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,633,387 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars ISLAND GETAWAY January 25, 2011

By Joseph H. Race VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

We all dream about running away from dreary boring jobs, especially during the cold winters, and landing in a tropical paradise (Saipan) with gorgeous beaches, swaying palms, and warm balmy breezes right off the blue, blue lagoon. For some travelers that are flexible and easy-going, it can become a reality, others have a tough time adjusting to a different culture, high humidity, lack of conveniences, and everything is falling apart and rusting out...and oh yeah, graft and corruption. Our protagonist Nina Barker ends up in the middle of this adjustment after her boyfriend Max broke her heart back on the mainland. She of course, takes up SCUBA, karoke, "boonie stomping," eating katsu and bats,and drinking too many cold beers; and finds a couple of boyfriends, one being a kind-hearted doctor, and the other just useless jetsam from a screwed-up life. In her job as a fledging lawyer, she finds herself dealing with 'gray' areas in helping her assigned judge make decisisons, which often seem a long, scary stretch from integrity. But she prevails and gets her life kinda back together. I liked it and found Nina an interesting character with a lot of hilarity and quirkiness in the novel. One classic line while Nina is thinking about herself in the islands, "What have I turned into? A bolero-wearing, suburban-mom-haired, fish-eating, rule-following cheater..." Buy it!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, Funny, Touching, Great November 26, 2010

By Dr3rdEye

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a great novel. The plot in brief: Nina, a depressive late-20s lawyer, comes to the end of both her job (fired) and relationship (catches the guy cheating) and moves to the fictional island of Mirimar. There, she works for a judge intent on dispensing personalized, tribal justice under the guise of a common law legal system while becoming romantically involved with both a nice-but-ultimately-boring-doctor and a not-so-nice-but-damn-exciting cad who claims to be a CIA agent. The book is laugh-out-loud funny in a number of places and involving enough that I read it in a single afternoon. But it's not a featherweight comic novel. Instead, it's a rather serious literary effort that examines the balance between desiring adventure, change, and novelty and being scared--even terrified--when one actually finds it. Well worth reading.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Read! March 18, 2011

By Pit Bull Lover

Format:Kindle Edition

What a quirky, well-written, funny, lovely book. I loved it! The story of a very well educated, intellectual, somewhat neurotic, searching young woman pulled at my heartstrings, made me laugh out loud and caused me to want to hold Nina and tell her that everything will be OK. How many of us, searching for ourselves and our place in this life, would be brave enough to go alone to a not-very-well-known tropical isle on the other side of the world, where we didn't know anyone, to try to "work it out?" Not many...but Nina did and had hilarious, interesting adventures along the way. I didn't want the story to end and look forward to the author's next book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Journey February 14, 2011

By Maragold

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I felt so many emotions while reading this book. It brought back memories of lost boyfriends, wanting to run away to a new and different place where everything would be perfect, feeling completely out of place and awkward and eventually moving to a new ground of acceptance. The novel creates an environment where a young girl can grow into a wiser and independent woman. It was both funny and poigniant and the tropical island culture gave the reader a glimpse of the excentricities of living a bit over the edge. I loved it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Tropical Elation January 29, 2011

By ShodaVision

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I laughed out loud (embarrassing my family on the subway). I wept out loud (embarrassing myself.)

I love this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Read! January 16, 2011

By Lori

Format:Paperback

What a great read! I love Nina for all of her quirks and her imperfections. I couldn't put it down.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Lost and Found in the Tropics January 15, 2011

By Galvin S. Deleon Guerrero

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

The odd thing about writing a book review--or a review of any work for that matter--is that the review, or re-view, is as much a re-flection of the reviewer as it is a reflection of the work itself. So as I read Arin Greenwood's "Tropical Depression", a not-so-fictitious (only a few of the names are changed to protect the guilty), somewhat hyperbolic, more-than-semi autobiographical tale of my home islands, I couldn't help but read it through my lens--what the anthropologist Paul Rabinow called the "insider's outsider", a native who never feels quite at home in his native town, but isn't exactly an outsider either, hence the label, insider's outsider.

As an insider's outsider, I found myself feeling many of the contradictory, paradoxical emotions that the novel's speaker feels--defensive, apologetic, embarrassed, disturbed, forgiving amused, uplifted, and sublime all at the same time--about how horribly and beautifully insane, or how insanely horrible and beautiful, our islands are. The speaker, Nina, puts it best upon returning to New York City after a year in "Miramar", when Nina's friends (don't quite) want to know more about the island, to which Nina tells herself, "They do not want to hear confusing stories about parasailing accidents and the CIA's deep involvement with Russian refugees. I can't tell them about George and Brad, Robin and the judges and the secretaries and the CIA, Erika and Rory, unpaved roads, strip clubs, cockfights, karaoke with the mafia, parasailing ropes snapping, fecal lagoons, missing Max [her ex-lover] and bitter haoles and the cows at the court and how delicious mangoes are when you get them from the right store...."

Indeed, "mercenaries, missionaries, and misfits" (Arin's labels for the three kinds of American expatriates who find themselves in Miramar) come to the islands with many misperceptions and dysperceptions about the islands, only to be disillusioned by the stark contrast and contentious conflict between their own self-righteousness and the islands' own self-wrongness. Arin's novel is thus not a postcard but, rather, a kaleidoscopic memoir of one such expat's attempt to capture the psychological and cultural dissonance that can result.

That dissonance is fertile ground for humor, which Arin sprinkles throughout the novel with the clever but forgiving wit of a curious, observant, and only sometimes judgmental travel writer. (That should come as no surprise given Arin's experience in travel writing.) Finding cows grazing in front of the islands' Supreme Court house and chickens milling about on the airport runway; unwittingly drinking undrinkable tap water; trying to be a vegetarian on an island obsessed with meat, especially SPAM; frequenting poker clubs-slash-strip clubs-slash-karaoke joints; and reluctantly swimming in a beautiful lagoon contaminated by fecal matter are just some of the bizarrities (Yes, I made that word up. Isn't it a cool and useful word?) that had me laughing throughout my read.

But the real bizzarities are the characters of the novel, who come to Technicolor life because they are based on real people living surreal lives. (Marquez's magic realism pales in contrast to the novel's surrealism.) The novel vividly presents a motley crew of missionaries, mercenaries, and misfits who are immensely diverse and distinct, yet share the common experience of being strange people in a strange land. (And boy do they drink and party and drink, which is a very verifiable reflection of the veritas of expats on the islands.) The novel also delves somewhat into the stories behind the foreign workers of Miramar, but linguistic and cultural barriers prevent the novel from providing any deep character studies of these equally diverse and distinct strangers in a strange land.

If the novel's characterization of foreigners is shallow, the novel's portrayal of the indigenous people was deeply depressing, only because it was so spot-on. While there are many redeeming characteristics in the local characters, the novel astutely observes that local politicians are crass and corrupt, local kids are raised by foreign nannies, and local cultures are fading away. (In that sense, Miramar is not so different from New York City.)

While locals might take offense to an outsider pointing these things out, Arin's non-judgmental travel-writing tone spares the novel from the usual self-righteous indignation that characterizes much of what haoles say and write about the islands. In fact, I found her treatment of local characters, much like her treatment of expat characters, to be incredibly humane. Although the novel is sometimes a bit too neurotically myopic, it does take us past caricatures of its characters and into the depths of who these people really are, with all their warts and ticks and struggles and joys. Just as the expats struggle to find themselves in this Island of the Lost, the locals struggle to find themselves in their lost island.

(There is one exception to this depth and that is the one character I could not stand, Brad. He is too cool and hip and unbelievably Indiana Jones/James Bond-ish to be real or have any real depth. Brad is, in my book, a classic douche bag.)

At its heart, and what I found most endearing, "Tropical Depression" is a simple and timeless tale of unrequited love. Having lost her love in New York City, Nina loses herself in the tropics, looking for (what she thinks is) love in others, even if what she's really looking for is still in New York, 6,000 miles away from Miramar. And, like many tales of unrequited love, in the end, she struggles not to find love, but to let go of the love that has been lost, and in the process, find not love, but herself.

Reading Arin's story of a haole in the tropics reminded me of my days as an islander in the Pacific Northwest. I used to get depressed yet happy in Tacoma--wet, cold, yet content to wrap myself up cozily in the dense greenery, misty weather, and fog-filled mornings. Likewise (or in complete contrast), Arin's heroine finds herself depressed yet happy in Miramar--humid, hot, yet content to wrap herself up cozily in the dense jungle, stormy/sunny weather, and hung-over mornings. She finds herself tropically depressed in the tropics. But, after losing herself in its metaphorical and literal jungles, she finds her way out of the tropics, out of her depression, and into herself. Read more ›