Maiden Voyage A Hero's Journey

Maiden Voyage an autobiography written by Tania Abei tells the story of her life at sea as she makes a journey around the world. Tania did not have the best life, she dropped out of high school and was only 18 years old. She had a dead end job as a bike messenger during the day and then at night she frequented the bars. Her and her father had a rough relationship only made worse by her life choices. Finally her father gave her a choice that would forever change the course of her life. Tania and her father did not get along at all and everything only gets worse when she moves out of the house at the age of fifteen. Then one day her father makes a purchase that begins to mend their relationship. He buys a small sailboat named Pathfinder, and

Perhaps it’s due to my close relationship with my mother but I do not think I could leave and go on journey around the world leaving my sick mother behind. I can also understand that it was a very complicated situation that she struggles very much with. At one point in the journey she contacts her mother and her mother tries to come out and finish the journey with her daughter. Tania does not allow her mother to come on the rest of the journey with her because she is supposed to be doing this journey alone, but also because she knows her mother is to sick and to weak. Eventually her mother falls extremely ill and Tania wants to go home and be with her mother which is what she tells her father. Her father does not think that this is good idea and tells her she should not come home. She goes back and is with her mother when she passes away. We get a peek into her past and the issues that exist with her mother. We learn that her and her siblings were taken away from their mother by their father after he had her mother declared mentally incompetent. More than that he fled with them from Switzerland to New York and they didn’t their mother again for a couple years. It’s a very trying and complex situation that clearly causes a lot of emotional distress for Tania throughout the course of her

It is very obvious that her time traveling around the world teaches her a lot and helps to grow as a person. I am amazed at the emotional and physical hardships she overcomes on this journey. I am also captivated by the experience she had, this journey clearly changed her life and brought her true love. She wrote the Epilogue over year after she actually returned from the journey. She tells of her last journey before selling Varuna in which she spread her mother’s ashes in the sea. After she sells the boat she pays her father back. Oliver and she are beginning their life together and she is a changed person. I believe she left that young girl in the ocean and came back a woman. Changed from the experiences she had and different from having confronted so many of her own demons out there on the