From Publishers Weekly

A mid-life crisis and a latent sense of adventure caused book editor South to give up her life in publishing and take up residence on the Bossanova, a steel-hull trawler she bought before knowing how to captain it. The subtitle is largely hyperbolic-South's time "at sea" was really a short, if perilous, sail from Florida to Sag Harbor, where the boat is now docked-but South makes an interesting memoir from her skillful observation of the sailing life: "Good seamanship isn't the thoughtless instinct that salty dogs make it seem to be. It's the good habit of always asking yourself the right questions in the right order and answering them thoughtfully." Sometimes, she seems to have forgotten landlubbers might pick up her book; a sentences like, "One danger is that your bow will slow and your stern will get kicked out to the side, causing you to be beam-to," is just one head-scratcher of many for the uninitiated. She can be clumsy when transitioning between sailing stories and other aspects of her life ("This sailing was happiness. For a time, happiness, too, had been Leslie."), but her clear-eyed perspective and involving stories keep the narrative moving. This small but well-observed memoir is a worthwhile read for anyone stuck in the workaday rut.
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From

South, a successful book editor with stints at Ballantine and Houghton Mifflin, turns 40 with "a complicated concoction of ennui and despair," an average midlife crisis. But her next step is far from ordinary: she abruptly walks away from her well-paying job, sells her recently acquired house in Pennsylvania and most of her belongings, and buys a used 40-foot, 30-ton trawler, planning to pilot it up the coast from Florida to Maine. South recounts the rigors of her nine-week course at the Chapman School of Seamanship, where her classmates include an aging executive, a pony-tailed trucker, an Alaskan fisherman, and a documentary filmmaker. She describes her sometimes harrowing, always challenging trip up the Atlantic coast, assisted by a fellow student and novice, a trip marked by sudden storms, tricky inlet currents, long, energy-sapping days, and incredibly gorgeous seascapes. Though not as daring as "climbing Everest or sailing solo around the world," for South the voyage was the most "intensely meaningful" thing she had ever done, and well worth relinquishing luxuries and security. Deborah Donovan
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