Richard J. King, Sailing Alone: A History ***

The preface states clearly that Sailing Alone is not a typical adventure book:

My own solo crossing was not an exceptional feat of seamanship. ... I'm quite proud of the voyage in terms of endurance, and my will and energy to make the whole adventure happen, but the passage across the Atlantic took longer than projected, I did not sail efficiently, and the skills that I lacked the most were exposed in embarrassing fashion. ... This book is not the story of individual excellence, nor is it a compendium of sailing records or a practical manual on how to do it if you are considering a solo voyage yourself.

King includes stories about prominent solo sailors such as Joshua Slocum, but he talks about their motivations (which he calls their why go) more than about their adventures. He describes mundane details about day-to-day life alone on a boat while eliding storms and dismastings. The overall effect is pleasantly conversational and tones down the heroic aura surrounding single-handed sailors. It's amazing how ill-prepared the early circumnavigators were!

 

 

Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season *** 1/2

A village witch is found murdered in rural Mexico. Their death is not particularly surprising given their clandestine role in many of the villagers' vices.

Hurricane Season is not a whodunit—we learn who killed the Witch fairly early—bur a whydunit. We learn about the events leading up to the murder from a handful of narrators, each of whom is caught up in the sex and violence of the local culture of macho poverty. Melchor uses the incident as a case study in the misogynist brutality of the society. It is intense and provides realistically insightful psychologies for its characters.

Jonathan Blitzer, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here ***

This book provides a history of US immigration policy since the 1970s, along with the contemporaneous history of the violent politics in the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras). The flow of migration and counterflow of deportation ties the stories together.

I knew the broad strokes of the story. Blitzer does a nice job of filling in the details. He relates the history from the point of view of a handful of immigrants, so his opinions are clear even though he doesn't editorialize. I wish he had editorialized: as it stands, the book doesn't offer any ideas about how to handle the complicated politics and ethics of immigration.

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time ** 1/2

The Ministry of Time is a science fiction romance that involves time travel. The narrator is a (roughly) contemporary English woman who falls in love with the Victorian-era polar explorer she has been assigned to help transition to the twenty-first century. The Ministry also needs to keep an eye on the "expats" to see whether they survive the time travel.

The story prioritizes the budding romance over the sci-fi elements (until the final chapter), which is fine except that Bradley isn't a very good writer. Evelyn and I took turns reading aloud while the other person washed dishes, and both of us stumbled over confusing similes and awkward sentence construction. Evelyn frequently complained about the narrator's immaturity, and I found the characters' motivations confusing.