Amity Gaige

Fiction 2020 | 267 pages

So many of my posts lately speak to shallow, underdeveloped characters.  Well, Sea Wife redeems them all!  Our main characters, Juliet and Michael,  are nuanced, rich, deep, intriguing, surprising.

How has Sea Wife gone unnoticed? I had not heard of it before my friend and colleague recommended this fine book to me.  Thank you, Sigal!   This book is a real gem, and Amity Gaige is a superb writer.

Michael convinces Juliet to go sailing for a year with their children, seven-year-old Sybil and George, just two-and-a-half.  It was Michael's dream, and Juliet was a hesitant partner in this journey.  We learn of their travels and relationships through both their voices.  Juliet writes after the trip is complete, recalling the many adventures and challenges in the current day, and we learn Michael's perspective from the log he kept while captaining the "Juliet" in the Caribbean. Yes, Michael named the 42-foot sailboat "Juliet" after his wife.

Juliet is clinically depressed.  This, of course, colors everything.  She is great mom, creative and playful, but not very self-confident, especially around sailing.  She is a poet, who has become stuck in her dissertation.  Her marriage is important and she deeply loves Michael and her children.   Michael tries hard to navigate the ups and downs of living with a depressed person.  He can be incredibly sensitive one moment and blind the next; loving but sometimes angry; introspective and also extroverted.  He asks Juliet many insightful questions, trying to keep the marriage and the boat afloat.  He is a great dad.  He is smart, adventurous, tender.  Both of these people are REAL, with depth and strengths and weaknesses.  

Even the children, Bosun Sybil and the Doodle George, have strong and unique personalities.  It is engaging to watch Sybil navigate living on a boat, home-schooled, creating ways to play and laugh and learn, serving as a foil for her sometimes arguing parents.  And by the end of the book, George still does not know how to talk, to the chagrin of his big sister.

I strongly recommend delightful Sea Wife. It is a story vividly told.

April 2026