Unmoored: Coming of Age in Troubled Waters

Summary

It’s the sixties. Everything’s groovy. Teenagers bask in the freedom of a country transformed. Counterculture is on the rise, and the times, they-are-a-changing. Everything, that is, except the author’s young life.

She doesn’t swoon for the Beatles or scream for the Stones. She doesn’t protest the Vietnam War or fight for women’s rights. Instead, from age seven to sixteen, she accompanies her father to a dilapidated barn on the edge of a dusty little town located on the outskirts of San Francisco, where she works after school, on weekends, and summers building a ship that is supposed to set her free. It is her father’s promise of one day sailing the ocean on a three-year, around-the-world adventure that keeps her going.

With the sixties and teenage torment as a backdrop, Unmoored is the parallel story of growth and redemption through the travails of a forty-four-foot schooner and the girl who helped guide it through storms, fire, near destitution and, ultimately, disaster, notwithstanding coping with a cold and moody father. But in the end, she learns that “Heritage’s worth, like ours, is not measured in terms of where she landed nor by what others thought of her, but in the attempt to get somewhere better than where she’d started. In that, she succeeded, and by default, so did we.”