Review of ‘Unmoored: Coming of Age in Troubled Waters’ by JR Roessl

REVIEW OF A MEDIUM AUTHOR’S FEATURED BOOK

★★★★★

As a sailor with ten years of experience who spent countless weekends on my 27-foot Newport sailing the Columbia River, I’ve read many sailing books and dreamed of ocean voyages.

Though I made frequent trips to Astoria, I never crossed the Columbia bar into the open ocean, those dreams remained just that, dreams. This context made “Unmoored” an unexpected and intriguing dive into what I can only describe as an almost zombie-like twilight zone experience.

The book presents a family so distressed that it’s hard to fathom their reality. The antagonist is the young sailor’s father, a man who mistreats his four daughters with shocking insensitivity. He treats them like servants and slaves, ordering them around mercilessly with crude, callous, and abusive language.

He reminds me of Joe Btfsplk from “Li’l Abner”—the character surrounded by a perpetual cloud of bad luck that he spreads to everyone around him, making people avoid his company. This father has the worst luck of any sailor I’ve encountered in fiction or nonfiction. He simply can’t catch a break.