eBook Review: Love with a Chance of Drowning

Torre DeRoche, Love with a Chance of Drowning

• Product Details

  • File Size: 958 KB
  • Print Length: 336 pages
  • Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1849534187
  • Publisher: Hyperion (May 14, 2013)
  • Sold by: Hachette Book Group
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B009R9RQ7K
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • Lending: Not Enabled
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars (98 customer reviews)
  • Price: $9.99 (I bought it on sale for $8.54. ) 

1. Short review:
For content:   (Amazon rating: 5 out of 5 stars -- I love it.)

2. Long review:
2.1. What I liked: Love with a Chance of Drowning is a romance-cruising-romance sandwich, and I liked that.
Roller-coaster or walk-in-the-park? A walk-in-the-park trying to be a roller-coaster.
Good value for the money.

2.2. What I did not like: Nothing that I can think of.

2.3. Who I think is the audience: I thought the audience would be cruising sailors, but it is everybody.

2.4. Is the book appropriate for children to read?  Yes.

2.5. On the basis of reading this book, will I buy the author's next book? Amazon lists no other book for Ms DeRoche. If one becomes available, I will give it a look.

2.6. The plot in a nutshell:

     "Torre wasn't looking for a relationship when she met Ivan in a San Francisco bar but charmed by his Latin good looks and kind, considerate nature she fell head over in heels in love. Yet their separation seemed inevitable, Torre had promised to return to Australia at the end of the year and Ivan planned to throw in his IT job and sail solo across the ocean. As the end began to draw near, Ivan suggested Torre join him and she was faced with a difficult choice, sail away with her lover or say goodbye. Despite her fear of deep water, disaster and ""anything that would fall out if you turned the ocean upside down and shook it" Torre's decides to surrender her comfortable city lifestyle for a love on a 32ft wooden boat in the middle of nowhere." --Shelleyrae, from her review of Love with a Chance of Drowning on Amazon.
     Torre sails with Ivan across the Pacific. Adventures. Fun people.
     During the voyage Torre comes to understand that she loves Ivan and Ivan loves the sailing life. Torre likes the sailing life, but she does not love it. She returns to Australia and leaves Ivan to his love.
     And they lived happily ever after, but I shall not tell you how that came about.

 2.7. Other:
     I got this book for the sailing. Turned out the sailing was secondary to the romance, but that was not apparent until the end.
     I was a boat bum, too. (Want to be one again.) I laughed when Torre and Ivan put their boat in storage on the hard in a tropical boatyard. I knew what they would find when they returned.

     I do not know if this book is DRM'd. I suspect it is. I stripped the DRM bobagem off my ebooks before my operating system went wonky.
     I had problems with Ubuntu Linux, the operating system I use most often; my other operating system is Windows XP which I use 1) as insurance against failure of Ubuntu and 2) because Windows media player plays DVDs better than anything I have found on Ubuntu. To eliminate the problems, I chose to strip my hard drive (reformat) and rebuild my system.
     Easy to say. Hard to do.
     I installed Windows XP, but it still lacks drivers. I plan to find those and install those in time. I am not in a hurry.
     I installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The latest version of Ubuntu is 13.10.
     Why did I not install the latest version?
     There is a myth that Change = Progress. There is another myth that 'Progress is good'. While that is often true, it is not always true.
     I grew up in Texas which means I grew up with the aphorism 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' Windows XP was not and is not broke. Windows Vista sure as frell did not fix it. To this day I cannot say Windows Vista without spitting. It gives me cause to recall the description of Boggies in Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings: Slow and sullen, and yet dull.
     Perhaps you, too, grew up with the saying 'Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.' Microsoft fooled me once with Vista. I have not given them the opportunity to fool me twice.
     Anyway, I discovered that the motive for Windows 8 was to provide an OS for tablets. My wife has a tablet -- an iPad. On rare occasions I use her iPad, but I prefer my laptops (notebooks to you non-Americans). That means Windows 8 is not fitted to my purposes. I will not buy it.
     Ubuntu 10.04 ain't broke. I tried Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin (PP), and you can read about that experience here. I discovered that PP was designed for tablets. In other words, PP is NOT an upgrade  for existing Ubuntu installations but a replacement for proprietary tablet operating systems. It will run laptops, but it will always be a bastard laptop system.
     Calibre updated their software to version 1.32. I did not find a way to install DeDRM on 1.32, so I uninstalled it and installed version 1.19. DeDRM installed fine on 1.19, thank you very much. As I said before, change does not mean progress.
     For we few, we happy few, who run Linux systems, this is the terminal command to install Calibre 1.19: sudo python -c "import sys; py3 = sys.version_info[0] > 2; u = __import__('urllib.request' if py3 else 'urllib', fromlist=1); exec(u.urlopen('http://status.calibre-ebook.com/linux_installer').read()); main()". After that, go here to find out how to  install DeDRM.
     For those who run Windows, patience. When I figure out how to load Calibre 1.19 on Windows, I shall write it up.
     For those who run an Apple OS, you're outa luck.

    YMMV.

2.8. Links: Torre DeRoche at Amazon

2.9. Buy the book:  Love with a Chance of Drowning