Read, Review, Travel: Love with a Chance of Drowning

I forget how I found out about this book, but I think it was recommended on a Facebook group related to traveling or travel books. Since I had read Maiden Voyage and enjoyed it, I figured I would also enjoy this book. Love with a Chance of Drowning: A Memoir was written by Torre DeRoche and published in 2013.

This memoir follows Torre, a woman from Australia, who moves to the United States. While in San Francisco, she meets Ivan who immigrated from Argentina to the United States. They start dating and become boyfriend and girlfriend. Ivan had purchased a sailing vessel before meeting Torre and had planned to sail around the world by himself. He tells Torre of his plan and that he intends to leave in about a year. He tries to convince Torre to join him on his adventure. Before agreeing to the trip, Torre reads some books including Maiden Voyage to see if she would be interested in sailing with Ivan. I thought that was so cool that we had each read the same book! She was captivated by Tania’s adventure, so she agrees to join Ivan.

However, Torre is very afraid of water and being alone on the ocean. In fact, Torre gets extremely seasick on their voyage between California and Mexico, so I am very surprised that she still agrees to sail with Ivan across the Pacific Ocean. She takes several days to decide on whether she still wants to sail with Ivan across the Pacific. She thinks that if she does not join Ivan, she is afraid he will abandon his goal of sailing around the world, and she would feel awful for making him stop his dream trip. I could have guessed that she would join him since I was only about a fourth of the way through the book!

She does feel a great sense of accomplishment when they land at their first Pacific island after being at sea for a few weeks. But most of the trip is soured when Ivan finds himself in predicaments that could have easily been avoided had he be more cautious or had he followed Torre’s advice. There are several times where I felt like yelling at Ivan to listen to Torre and other times where I wanted to yell at Torre to leave Ivan. It was an entertaining book although a lot of the bad circumstances could have been avoided, which frustrated me. This book was nowhere near as good as Maiden Voyage though!