Description
The author of Nothing to Declare offers a witty and eloquent account of her midlife odyssey down the Mississippi River in a battered old houseboat, accompanied by two river rats called Tom and Jerry and a cantankerous rat terrier named Samantha Jean, describing living life like a pirate and surviving natural disasters, all the while coming to terms with the changes in her life. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
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In the fall of 2005 acclaimed writer Mary Morris set off down the Mississippi River in a battered old houseboat called The River Queen, with two river rats named Tom and Jerry and an ailing, irascible rat terrier named Samantha Jean. Her father had just died. Her daughter had gone off to college. Lost and uncertain, Morris returned to the river of her youth, to the waterside towns where her father had once lived. In this poignant and often humorous memoir, Morris reclaims the world of her childhood as she gets a bearing on her future. She describes traveling down stream through the Midwest, living like a pirate as she survives a tornado and infestation of mayflies, bivouacs on beaches, and ties up to paddleboats in the dark of night. As she learns to pilot the River Queen through these fabled waters, Morris delivers a memoir that "deserves to be both a best-seller and a classic" (The Courier-Journal).
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