- Voice: Candice Moll voices a first-person memoir written by Torre DeRoche, so the first person on this recording belongs to somebody else.
- Big ideas: A terror of deep water, a stranger with a sailboat, love as a reason to do the frightening thing, an ocean crossing.
- Atmosphere: Nervy and funny, seasick and smitten.
- Worth it?: The travel half keeps outgrowing the romance half, and the reviewers noticed before the copy did.
Candice Moll speaks the first person in this audiobook, though the woman whose first person it is spent the entire voyage terrified of deep water. Torre DeRoche wrote the memoir; somebody else reads it. Eleven hours and twenty-five minutes, published by Brilliance Audio on May 14, 2013, about a city dweller who meets a man in a San Francisco bar and learns he is days from casting off the dock lines to sail around the world aboard a small boat. She goes anyway, and the fear goes with her.
Every proper noun in this story arrives from the review column and not from the description. The blurb offers a soulful Argentinean man and his small sailboat, and stops. Linda Ballou's five-star response names him Ivan, names the boat the Amazing Grace, gives the length as thirty-two feet and the condition as dilapidated, and sends it across the Pacific Ocean. Tracey Norton pairs them as Torre and Ivan, the couple a husband has been dreaming about for years. Debbie Kramer calls him her Latin lover. The marketing stays coy about details the readers hand over in their opening sentences.
Marketing on this page opens with three sentence fragments and a question. New love, exotic destinations, a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, and then the line asking what could go wrong. That is a construction built to be scanned, not read, and the actual book, by every account posted beneath it, is slower and odder than the rhythm suggests. Sonya Moore adds a pacing note the copy would never print: putting it down got harder in the second half, which hints that the crossing outgrows the courtship that set it up.
TML Writes files it in the wrong category, and the slip is instructive. That four-star response calls this Torre's first novel and a great summer beach read, praises the great voice and the fabulously interesting travel tale, and closes glad the author has found both a calling and a love. Nothing suggests fiction is meant literally. It reads like a reader so taken with the shape of the thing that novel came out as a compliment. The listing is unambiguous either way: memoir, equal parts love story and travel writing.
The Strengths
Fear is the engine here, and a better one than the romance. The description is precise about the problem: a woman terrified of deep water decides that keeping the man means boarding the voyage of her nightmares, waving goodbye to dry land and bracing for it. Tracey Norton, claiming to be less phobic about the ocean, still admits to a readiness to fight tooth and nail for that ditch kit, the kind of specific that only comes from someone who has been all the way through the book. Fear plus love plus a small boat holds up better than either half alone.
Debbie Kramer disputes the framing and is probably right to. You might think it is a love story, that response argues, but ultimately the book is about the adventure: many glorious days of spotting whales and dolphins, a ride you go along on and not a romance you watch from outside. Linda Ballou agrees from the opposite direction, calling it a true love story and then wishing for more about the stunning scenery of the places visited. Between them they describe a book whose travel half keeps outgrowing its billing.
Style draws consistent praise, though never for the recording. Sonya Moore reports being pulled in from the first page, calls the writing vivid and engaging, and says the reading felt like living the experience, with laugh-out-loud moments arriving often. TML Writes credits a great voice. Tracey Norton relates completely to Torre's fears and misgivings. Three separate readers reaching for the same quality, an easy forward pull, is a fair predictor that eleven hours will not feel like labor.
Before You Commit to Love with a Chance of Drowning
Sonya Moore's five stars contain a line that only works in print. The book pulls you in from the first page, that response says, and actually from before the first page, because the title and the cover are irresistible. In audio the cover is a thumbnail on a shop page and the first page is a voice starting in mid-air, so that particular pleasure does not survive the change of format. It is a small reminder that enthusiasm posted under a title was not necessarily earned by the version you are about to buy.
Substituting a narrator for a memoirist is the decision worth thinking through. This book runs on a specific personality: self-deprecating, frightened, funny about being frightened, and every reviewer responds to that personality directly, several of them calling it a voice. Candice Moll has to build all of it from the text. Brilliance Audio supplies no note on approach, no author introduction and no sign that DeRoche took part. On a first-person memoir where the appeal is the person, that is precisely what a sample is for.
Linda Ballou's disappointment is worth borrowing as a caution. That response wished for more about the scenery of the places visited, a real gap in something sold partly as travel writing. Debbie Kramer lists whales and dolphins; nobody names a port. The blurb gestures at the most beautiful and remote destinations in the world without naming one of them either. Shop here for a book about places and you will get a book about two people who happen to be crossing an ocean.
Who Will Get the Most From It
Landlubbers living with someone who dreams about boats are the sharpest fit, and one reviewer is exactly that person, handed the book by a husband in what that review suspects was a not too subtle ploy, and it worked. Anyone who likes a romance where the obstacle is not a misunderstanding but an ocean will be well served. Listeners who want to be talked into something frightening, by somebody who was frightened first and admits it on every page, should start right here.
Look elsewhere if you want charts, ports and cultural detail, since the one reviewer who asked for that did not get it; if a memoir read by a hired voice troubles you on principle; or if seasickness by proxy is not your idea of a good eleven hours. Borrow it if the premise makes you nervous, because the nervousness is the entire point, and by five separate accounts the book is on your side about it.
Does Torre DeRoche narrate her own audiobook?
No. Candice Moll is the credited narrator, so the first-person account of the crossing is voiced by someone other than the person who lived it. The listing carries no author introduction or afterword. For a memoir whose appeal is the narrator's personality, that is worth auditioning before you commit.
Will I learn anything about sailing from this audiobook?
Less than the shelf suggests. Reviewers mention a thirty-two foot boat called the Amazing Grace, a ditch kit, whales and dolphins, and glorious days at sea. One five-star response specifically wanted more about the scenery of the places visited. Nobody quotes a passage of technical seamanship.
Who is Ivan, and why does the description avoid naming him?
Ivan is the sailor Torre meets in a San Francisco bar and follows onto the boat, named by two reviewers and by neither the blurb nor the title. The description calls him only a soulful Argentinean man. A third response settles for her Latin lover. The withholding appears deliberate.
