Black Wave, by John and Jean Silverwood
Black Wave: A Family’s Adventure at Sea and the Disaster That Saved Them
by John and Jean Silverwood
A good story is a good story, 
even when something is lost in translation. Good stylists don’t always have good stories to tell, and vice versa: the pairing of the two aspects usually results in Great Literature.
Black Wave is a good story told — well, just told. Which, considering that the storytellers participated in the disaster in the subheading, is disappointing.
After making some tough choices, John and Jean Silverwood decide leave their home in California and take their four children on a tour of the seas. They purchase a catamaran and set sail in 2003. After two years of tropical islands, pirates and familial growth, the Silverwood family runs their boat into a coral reef in the Pacific Ocean.
The predominant first section of the book is written by Jean. She alternates chapters between her and her children’s efforts to save a rapidly bleeding John and a rapidly sinking ship, switching out to events past to give the readers a good idea how the family got to the coral reef. Jean does a fantastic job showing how her family was impacted (and emboldened) emotionally — John struggled heavily with bouts of alcoholism on the trip, and their teenage children matured rapidly as a result of everything happening. John’s short section closes the book with a wrap-up of the family’s adventures and a retelling of the story of another ship that sunk on the same reef nearly 150 years prior.
What nearly scuttles the book is the quality of the Silverwoods’ writing. They’re not professional writers, which is easy to take into account. Jean often writes well, but her narration is often reduced to lengthy segments of hand-wringing and pseudo-poetic verse. She just tries to hard, and makes it almost unreadable in spots. John’s style is more direct; he lets the story of the sunken sailing ship Julia Ann tell itself. He’s not masterful, necessarily, but has a flow not dissimilar from someone like Jon Krakauer. At the very least, it was a fresh breath from Jean’s wordy ebb and flow.
Overall, I enjoyed this book, but I certainly didn’t love it. I’m glad the Silverwood family told it, and I’m glad they survived and were strengthened as a family by the sinking ship. But I also wish they would’ve had more hands on deck when this thing was written.
Black Wave
2008
by John and Jean Silverwood
ISBN-13: 978-1400066551