The Speed of Falling Objects

Finished July 6

The Speed of Falling Objects by Nancy Richardson Fischer

This teen novel was a real pageturner. Danny Warren is almost seventeen and living with her mom in Oregon. When she was seven, she lost an eye in an accident, and shortly after her parents split up. Her mom is a nurse and Danny has taken on a lot of the knowledge of that job, reading the journals her mom brings home and having conversations about the cases described. She good at, and interested in, science. 

Her dad, Cougar, has a television show where he travels around the world, doing dangerous things, and using knowledge and ingenuity to get out of dangerous situations, usually with a celebrity in tow. Danny has only seen him a few times since he left and she feels that due to the compensations that she's had to learn to deal with her new physical reality, he doesn't feel she measures up to the standards he's set anymore. He tends to call her by her full name Danielle, instead of her preferred nickname.

Danny's best friend is adopted and is part of a large family, but still longs to know about her birth parents. The two are close, have each other's backs, and both feel outside the normal social groups at school. 

When Cougar suddenly invites Danny to come on one of his shows with a hot teen idol as the guest, she both longs to go to get closer to her dad, and is afraid that once again she won't measure up. She also has to deal with her mother's reluctance to let her go/

On the trip, into the Peruvian rainforest, the small plane the group is in crashes, and Danny discovers many things about her dad and the others on the trip, and about her own resources to deal with the dangerous situation.

I liked Danny, and her reactions to the situations and attitudes that she dealt with. This experience had her coming out of her shell as she had to do things and be part of a team in a way that she wasn't used to. 

Uncharted

Finished February 10

Uncharted: A Couple's Epic Empty-Nest Adventure Sailing From One Life to Another by Kim Brown Seely

This memoir is told by a woman in her forties. In 2009, her husband convinced her that they should buy a sailboat that had been repossessed by a bank and was therefore a pretty good deal. They's talked about buying a sailboat, but this 54 foot Moody needed work and was in Rhode Island while they lived in Seattle, and thus would need to be moved across the country. They bought it and her husband Jeff, who had some sailing experience in his youth worked to get Kim and their two tween and teen sons competent sailors. While this book is about one specific sailing trip they took when their youngest left for college, it is also about the experience of having one's children move into adulthood by leaving, and about the way the relationship between a couple changes over time.

Partway through this particular trip, the couple's sons join them for a week, flying in to meet them by float plane. The whole family then docks the boat, locks it up and goes back home, with their older son heading back to his internship in San Francisco, and the couple flying east with their youngest to take him to college in northern New York State. 

There were definitely things that were foreign to me, besides sailing. I can't imagine my parents escorting me to university, or there being so much crying about me setting off on my own adult adventure, but maybe mine hid it well. I found the sailing well described, so that even a complete novice like me could understand, but not full of technical stuff that would bore the reader. 

It was the trip that fascinated me, leaving Seattle, and soon sailing into Canada, along the edge of Vancouver Island and the mainland, and up the Inside Passage to the Great Bear Rainforest. 

There are four pages of maps in the front of the book that show their journey, and they are better marked than other such books that I've read in terms of naming waterways and islands, but there were still a few that were named in the text, but not indicated on the maps. This is a pet peeve of mine. 

The journey was full of wonder at the nature and people that they encountered, and Seely really gave a sense of the feeling and ambience of the days. 

Also fun was that there was a lot of references to music, as they used an iPod for background, company, and mood. 

Seely is an award-winning journalist and the quality of the writing here shows that. I really enjoyed this book, and its setting was of great interest to me.