Maiden Voyage
by Tania Aebi, Bernadette Brennan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bernadette Brennan, Tania AebiEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-09-29
ISBN: 0345410122
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of Maiden Voyage
Book Review: "Shiver me timbers!"
Summary: 1 Stars
Maybe I'm being unfair, but MAIDEN VOYAGE rankled me from the starboard dust jacket to the port, with its repetitive, "The first American woman---and the youngest person ever---to circumnavigate the globe alone." That, and the saccharine title just set my teeth on edge before I ever turned to page one.
But turn I did, hoping this book would be more than it seemed to promise. As an approximate contemporary of Tania Aebi's who bought his first boat just as she set sail in "Varuna" (and a native New Yorker) I expected to be able to relate to Tania, much as I did to Robin Lee Graham who circumnavigated in "Dove" when I was much younger. But I found I really didn't like the Tania Aebi I met in these pages, either when I first read MAIDEN VOYAGE in 1985 or revisiting it in 2006.
Perhaps it was the publisher's pitch. Tania was repetitively described as a "troubled" adolescent, but it soon became clear that her biggest "trouble" was surviving an affluent, eccentric family. With an artist father and a dying, mentally ill mother in a sanitarium in Europe, Tania could be expected to have a slew of "issues" and she does throughout the book. I just found her emotional self-absorption boring in the extreme.
I also found that I was truly infuriated at her father who should have been arrested for intent to commit manslaughter. Apparently Ernst Aebi believed that a solo circumnavigation was just the ticket toward giving his daughter a focus in life, and so he practically shanghaied her into making the trip even though Tania could barely motor "Varuna" out into the Narrows the day she left. Not that Ernst was any better. "Varuna" set sail with all manner of design flaws (weak chainplates, a bad engine, and a water-scooping hawsepipe, any one of which might have sunk her in sight of the Brooklyn Bridge). The man was so driven to send his daughter out to fulfill HIS dreams that he (and they) seemed to have spent no time at all on evaluating the boat for its intended purpose. Given Tania's lack of sailing skills and her lack of familarity with "Varuna," the thing was a deathtrap for her. Miraculously, she lived to tell about it.
I learned more about sailing just taking my 24-footer out onto Long Island Sound three days a week than Tania seemed to learn in months of continuous blue water cruising. Her navigation skills were suicidally poor and her understanding of weather, current and wind seemed stalled at a beginner's level all along.
Her remembrances of people she met and places she visited were the high points of MAIDEN VOYAGE, though we certainly could have used less information about her various (yawn!) lovers along the way, all of whom seemed stamped out of a Gallic cookie-cutter. The writing style is choppy, though it's altogether clear that Bernadette Brennan (of CRUISING WORLD magazine) did most of the actual writing after culling Tania's memory. The "Oh yeah, now this," and "Oh yeah, now that" tone of MAIDEN VOYAGE is a product of a tale told in fits and starts with no unifying thread.
That seems to be the biggest failing of MAIDEN VOYAGE. Although Tania gives us a colorful travelogue, she barely shows us any insight or reflection. The experience of single-handing around the world seems to pass over her like a wave, leaving barely a ripple behind. Returning to New York at age twenty she seems barely more mature than she did at age eighteen when she sailed away. She is not Bernard Moitessier, and "Varuna" is not "Joshua". At the end, she's just a girl and it's just a boat. More's the pity.
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