Name: An Embarrassment of Mangoes
Rating: 3.571428571428572 (7 reviews)
ISBN: 9780767914277

Ann Vanderhoof

Describes how the author and her husband, two fortysomething professionals, quit their stressful careers, rented out their house, and embarked on a two-year voyage around the Caribbean aboard a forty-two-foot sailboat called Receta and details the colorful landscapes, characters, food, and experiences they encountered along the way. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

A Caribbean Interlude

An Embarrassment of Mangoes

Andrew John Kinney

This book appeals to me because Ann and Steve have done what I intend to do in a couple of years - sail from the North American mainland south through the Bahamas to the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and on down to the real goal, the Lesser Antilles islands. Ann's account of their trip from Toronto to Trinidad is replete with good sailor's stories, but it is not so long on sailing detail to be off-putting to non-sailors. Ann waxes eloquent about her beloved Grenada, and I get it, having spent time on Nevis, Saba, and Montserrat, as well as the Bahamas out-islands; the places farthest from the cruise ship itineraries are still in many ways the "old Caribbean" where people are friendly and not jaded by dealing with the thousandth American tourist whining that things are not the same as at home. Such places are rarer and rarer, and I hope to visit Grenada in December, so if COVID doesn't wreck my plan, I'll see how much it has changed since Ann and Steve first made landfall in 1998. 

Ann is an expert chef and food writer, and since my tastes in food incline toward the simplest possible meals, I skipped over some of the purely food related parts. I'm embarrassed to say that I have never fired up the oven on my boat, though it does make a great supplemental storage locker. My idea of haute cuisine in an underway meal is boiling water on the galley stovetop to put in a dehydrated pasta primavera back-packing meal, so most of Ann's cooking ideas are wasted on me.

Where I find common ground with her, and a lot of it, is regarding the joys of being in touch with nature at sea or in the coves and bays or a remote island. Doing a night passage during which small fish jump aboard your boat never fails to make me smile (this has happened to me every time I've crossed the Gulf Stream). Dolphins crossing and re-crossing the bow and following you for half an hour is a magical thing, and Ann describes such sea-faring lore with the kind of wonder it deserves. Her description of the people of the Windward Islands is likewise on target, at least in my experience. This off the beaten path Caribbean is so different from the places most Americans see when getting off a cruise ship that it's hard to explain to the Carnival Cruise guests what they are missing, and in reality, I'm happy for them not to go to these few remaining happy and hard-to-get-to places that are not yet selling gold chains and Rolexes by the cruise ship dock. 

This was a quick read and worth the time I spent on it. It made me wish for a world without COVID so I can travel again and sail south; many of the Caribbean islands are still closed, including the one I most want to go back to. 2021 cannot come too soon.

An Embarrassment of Mangoes A Caribbean Interlude

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