#wavewalker

Owned?: No, library Page count: 397 My summary: When she was seven years old, Suzanne Cook's father promised her family the adventure of a lifetime. They would be sailing around the world, following in the footsteps of Captain Cook, seeing the sights and taking in all that the Earth has to offer. Ten years later, Sue finally managed to escape, having survived shipwrecks, low supplies, customs agents, visa nightmares, boredom, isolation, and years of hard work. Now, she's telling the story of a life lived on the waves, and why she chose to leave it all behind. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

I don't usually dabble in memoir, unless it's of someone I knew about prior to picking the book up - nonetheless, this story interested me from when I saw the book hanging around at work. Heywood's had a hell of a life. Ten years at sea, never having anywhere but her ship to call home, entirely at the whims of her father, who seemed to have been taking this trip for the sake of his own ego. You know the type; the patriarch who uproots his entire family to go and fulfil his dream, with no thought as to the wellbeing of anyone else. Sue and her brother struggled to get an education at sea, with Sue having to work extremely hard to pass any kind of exams in the chaos of a life at sea, while Jon seemed to just sort of give up or otherwise not be interested in schoolwork. Sue wanted to go back to England, or failing that just go to school and be able to get friends and have a normal life, but her father's ambitions lead her to being torn from every place she could have settled. And when she is in one place for a while, it's not good - later on, when she was about sixteen, her parents pretty much just dumped her and Jon on an island, alone, with limited money and a very limited visa, expecting her to look after Jon.

It sounds like a brutal life, and Sue's story really evokes the fear and hopelessness that she must have been feeling at that time. You really feel her pain as she goes from a young child not quite understanding the implications of what her father has gotten her into, to a teenager who just wants to get out. It's obvious that Heywood still bears a lot of resentment to her parents - to her father for uprooting her, taking money from her, making her work for him, and never listening to her; and to her mother for neglecting her, being openly hostile to her, and dismissing her thoughts and feelings. That comes across, but to be fair, you can't really spin 'they left a sixteen year old girl to look after her brother with no money or resources alone' into something that makes either of them sound like the parent of the year. The only thing I took real issue with, as I often do with this style of memoir, is the amount of direct speech. It always takes me out of this kind of narrative - there's no way you can remember that much conversation from years ago, it's got to be paraphrased or otherwise made up from what you do remember. That's not, like, a dealbreaker for me or anything, but it does annoy me when I see it pop up. Probably why I don't read this style of memoir often, really.

He looked at me, and in his eyes I saw something that I recognised all too well - the fear of being trapped inside someone else's dream.

Wavewalker by Suzanne Heywood

Synopsis:

Aged just seven, Suzanne Heywood set sail with her parents and brother on a three-year voyage around the world. What followed turned instead into a decade-long way of life, through storms, shipwrecks, reefs and isolation, with little formal schooling. No one else knew where they were most of the time and no state showed any interest in what was happening to the children.

Suzanne fought her parents, longing to return to England and to education and stability. This memoir covers her astonishing upbringing, a survival story of a child deprived of safety, friendships, schooling and occasionally drinking water… At seventeen Suzanne earned an interview at Oxford University and returned to the UK."