≡ [PDF] Boat Girl A Memoir of Youth Love and Fiberglass Melanie Neale 9780983825227 Books

Boat Girl A Memoir of Youth Love and Fiberglass Melanie Neale 9780983825227 Books

Download As PDF : Boat Girl A Memoir of Youth Love and Fiberglass Melanie Neale 9780983825227 Books

Boat Girl A Memoir of Youth Love and Fiberglass Melanie Neale 9780983825227 Books

I devoured this book in two sittings, the whole time with my heart in my throat.

I read this through the lens of being a parent of a girlchild who was born on a sailboat and has never lived on land. I read this through the lens of being a family on a boat, which is the weirdest mix of totally public and totally private. I read this wondering what my kids would think when I write about our voyages, and I read this wondering what my kids would write about those same voyages.

I also read this critically, as a fellow editor. For some reason, I could not shut off that part of my brain, as I usually do when I'm engaged in pleasure reading. I'm absolutely in awe of the balancing act Melanie pulled off here; boat writing does not happen in a vacuum, but within the context of a very small, very tight community, often filled with frenemies. Everything you say is going to be judged by someone who was there, knows someone who was there, or sailed on a boat like that once and is going to tell you you got it wrong. But by taking her writing right down to the grit, Melanie managed to write something incontrovertible and ringing with truth. It's *her* story, sometimes almost harshly so, and as such cannot be challenged, except by someone who would then have to present their truth as well. It's a brilliant way of going about it.

It takes some tremendous strength to out yourself through your growing, formative, challenging years. It takes some serious guts to announce to the world that you have daddy issues, and here are the events that cemented them. It's even harder when the whole world knows who your parents are and read the book they wrote about your life. In order for your truth to surface, you have to first break through a vast layer of willful misconception. I'm in awe of the subtexts here.

The thing that kept me smiling through the whole book, though, was the fact that although she questioned her parents, her family, her place in the world, her body, her purpose... she never once ever questioned her rightful place as the "boat girl." There's an unshakeable confidence there that I found joyful, and relatable. Even though relationships with people can be troubling, there's always the sea, and that's always going to be home.


Tags : Boat Girl: A Memoir of Youth, Love, and Fiberglass [Melanie Neale] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. "Boat Girl" is the heartbreaking memoir of growing up aboard a sailboat. Throughout the 1980's and 90's,Melanie Neale,Boat Girl: A Memoir of Youth, Love, and Fiberglass,Beating Windward Press,098382522X,General,Biography & Autobiography : Personal Memoirs,Biography & AutobiographyPersonal Memoirs,Literary Criticism,Literary Criticism General,Literary CriticismGeneral,Personal Memoirs,Sailing - General,Special Interest - Family,Sports & Recreation : Sailing - General,Sports & RecreationSailing,Travel - General,Travel Special Interest Family,Travel with children family holidays

Boat Girl A Memoir of Youth Love and Fiberglass Melanie Neale 9780983825227 Books Reviews

I'm one of the lucky ones. Long before the publication of this book, long before the Short Story column that appeared in Cruising World magazine, long before the indelible Hurricane Wilma feature in Soundings, even before the college seminars and the distinguished MFA, I was lucky to know the boat-mad kid who would become the writer Melanie Neale. I am myself a boat-mad kid (a condition unbounded by age), and I say lucky because, even in a world as fluid as liveaboard sailing, kindred spirits don't find each other as often as you'd guess. Yet from the moment Melanie and I first met on an anchored boat in Narragansett Bay, we each recognized in the other one who steered by familiar stars. Melanie's Boat Girl captures the wonders and the paradoxes of growing up just offshore from American culture in a way that I haven't ever seen in lifetime of reading about such things. So now you're one of the lucky ones. For if you too are a boat-mad kid, the story of this Boat Girl might just point you toward home.
Tim Murphy
Editor-at-Large, Cruising World
Coauthor, Fundamentals of Marine Service Technology (ABYC, 2012)
In 1980, I was just a project, but my mom and dad had big plans for me.

I started sailing when I was 3 months old and I learned to swim and climb before I could accually walk! I spent my childhood sailing from eastern Canada down the east cost of the states all the way to the Bahamas every year aboard L'Istorlet, as CS 27 and then Kamsin, a CS 36. I can't remember exaclty when I met Melanie and Carolyn, but it must have been somewhere in the early 90's.

Reading Boat Girl was like going back in time as it brought back so many childhood memories, reading about all those places so familiar to me!

This is the first book I read since the birth of my second child, and once I opened it, I couldn't stop reading until I was done! There are so many things you don't know about your friends and I find that writing the way Melanie wrote her story is like offering yourself in your most vulnerable position. This book is both a great story but a shocking thruth that I never suspected! I enjoyed reading it and it made me realise how life can be tough but amaizing alltogethere.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone! I even bought an extra copy for my parents! Happy reading!
The entire time I was reading Boat Girl, I kept thinking about a quote from Louisa May Alcott from Transcendental Wild Oats and the danger of trying to live for one's principals, and how unforgiving the world can be in relation to the "other." Boat Girl is very much about the other; it's a different way of living, so foreign to most of the cubicle-clad world a family's a attempt to leave behind convention and the scrutiny that that bold decision can invite. But Melanie's story, which takes place in exotic island settings and quaint ports up and down the coast, is about so much more. At its heart it's the story of a girl finding herself, finding her own voice, becoming her own person. The insecurities, the hopes, the broken hearts. Which takes a story about life on the rollicking waves of the high sea and very much grounds it in the cold, hard earth of growing up. And the best part is that Melanie's whole story isn't written yet. I look forward to the next chapter! HIGHLY recommend!
I devoured this book in two sittings, the whole time with my heart in my throat.

I read this through the lens of being a parent of a girlchild who was born on a sailboat and has never lived on land. I read this through the lens of being a family on a boat, which is the weirdest mix of totally public and totally private. I read this wondering what my kids would think when I write about our voyages, and I read this wondering what my kids would write about those same voyages.

I also read this critically, as a fellow editor. For some reason, I could not shut off that part of my brain, as I usually do when I'm engaged in pleasure reading. I'm absolutely in awe of the balancing act Melanie pulled off here; boat writing does not happen in a vacuum, but within the context of a very small, very tight community, often filled with frenemies. Everything you say is going to be judged by someone who was there, knows someone who was there, or sailed on a boat like that once and is going to tell you you got it wrong. But by taking her writing right down to the grit, Melanie managed to write something incontrovertible and ringing with truth. It's *her* story, sometimes almost harshly so, and as such cannot be challenged, except by someone who would then have to present their truth as well. It's a brilliant way of going about it.

It takes some tremendous strength to out yourself through your growing, formative, challenging years. It takes some serious guts to announce to the world that you have daddy issues, and here are the events that cemented them. It's even harder when the whole world knows who your parents are and read the book they wrote about your life. In order for your truth to surface, you have to first break through a vast layer of willful misconception. I'm in awe of the subtexts here.

The thing that kept me smiling through the whole book, though, was the fact that although she questioned her parents, her family, her place in the world, her body, her purpose... she never once ever questioned her rightful place as the "boat girl." There's an unshakeable confidence there that I found joyful, and relatable. Even though relationships with people can be troubling, there's always the sea, and that's always going to be home.