Coming off the disappointment of The Time Traveler’s Wife, I’ve spent the last few days reading some quick, satisfying reads. The first was The White, a book I’ve had waiting on my shelf for several months. The story of a colonial woman captured as a girl by Indians, who then goes on to live as one of their own, sparked my interest. In sparse, poetic language, Larsen transforms the real life story of Mary Jemison and gives it an ethereal, dreamlike quality, making the reading of this novella a pleasurable, at times sublime, experience.

Secondly was Disappearing Ingenue, which was one of my finds at the recent booksale. I’ll admit, besides the enticing title, what really piqued my interest about this book was the cover art, so reminiscent of those old Nancy Drew book illustrations. What’s inside is a collection of eight interrelated stories about Eleanor Stoddard, from her awkward childhood to eccentric adulthood. Pritchard’s heroine is both quirky and capricious, her life both hilarious and sorrowful – and always entertaining.

Lastly was Challenging the Pacific, written by Maud Fontenoy, the first woman to row the famed Kon-Tiki route from Peru to Polynesia. I received this book from Authorlink to review on their site. And lest anyone go thinking that because of its origins that I might be inclined to be more favorable than the book deserved, rest assured I have no qualms against writing a negative review. (My Authorlink editor has in fact chided me in the past for my somewhat vitriolic assessments of certain books – a Nicholas Sparks piece immediately comes to mind.) Luckily and unbeknownst to the folks at Authorlink, I have a penchant for adventure tales on the high seas as well as female travelogues, so Fontenoy’s book was one I immediately dived into (pardon the pun). I finished it in one sitting and was completely enthralled by this woman’s experience – on the Pacific, alone, in a rowboat – in fact, I am in awe. One of my favorite passages from the book comes near the end of her journey:

Happiness can be found in many things that are much closer to us than we imagine. It lies in doing the things we have chosen to do, in learning to do them better and better until we find in perfection true well-being. The hardest part is accepting what you are and finding the courage to make your dreams come true, along with your choices and projects. […] Difficulty should not be a brake, but a challenge. Happiness is a rare thing, which must be deserved, and life swings between joy and disappointment.

I enjoyed reading about her experience so much that the next day I went to the library and checked out Across the Savage Sea, her prior book which recounts her passage across the northern Atlantic, another female first. Her first book is not as refined as the second, in parts it lacks the tightness in narrative of her second one, but it’s still an amazing story, and one that I read nonstop until I finished. Through her solitary expeditions, Maud endures gales, capsizes, starvation, scorching sun and more, showing how the limits of endurance can be pushed as far as someone is determined to go. Truly a role model and an adventurer worthy to join the ranks of others who’ve broken frontiers and braved their own fears to achieve greatness.