Genre: Travel
Memoir
Description:
“Can a two-career couple really pick up stakes and move to Provence?
Keith and Val had a dream – to live in Provence, the land of brilliant
sunlight, charming hilltop villages and the deep blue waters of the
Mediterranean.
But there were two problems: they weren’t French speakers and they had
full-time jobs. So they came up with a plan…”
Author:
“Keith Van Sickle is a technology industry veteran and lifelong
traveler who got his first taste of overseas life while studying in England
during college. But it was the expat assignment to Switzerland that made him
really fall in love with Europe. With his wife Val and their trusty dog, he now
splits his time between Silicon Valley and Provence, delving ever deeper into
what makes France so endlessly fascinating.”
Find out more about Keith on his website.
Appraisal:
At its heart One Sip at a Time
is a travel memoir. And yet it is different than most travel memoirs I’ve read
in ways both good and … not really bad, not really good, definitely different.
I’ll try to explain.
There are two things I tend to look for and expect in a travel memoir.
The two words in that phrase are a hint. For the travel part I’m hoping to get
a sense of the place the person is traveling to or through. That might include
something about the scenery, the culture, the people, or whatever it is that
made this place special, different, or worth visiting to the author. The memoir
part is the more personal. It’s what sets a travel memoir apart from a
guidebook or brochure from the local tourism office. Ideally this part is not
only how they react to the experience of traveling, but also how it changed
them.
Typically, that last item comes from a narrative that is mostly
chronological with (sometimes literally) one foot in front of the other, going
from point A to point B. This book isn’t like that. Although it has two parts
that are tied together chronologically, it’s more like a series of essays or
true stories that related different experiences with no obvious order or
transition from one to the other. What that meant was that rather than having a
climax or realization of how the trip had changed the author near the end, it
happened (or the reader noticed and realized it was happening) through a
gradual process. If anything, that’s more realistic in how change really
happens and it worked for me as a reader.
As for the travel part, I thought the author’s insights into the
culture and people went much deeper than a typical travel memoir would, largely
because his goal wasn’t to be a traveler, but to be an actual resident (even if
short term) of the area of France he was visiting. That paid off, for him and
for us.
Format/Typo
Issues:
No significant issues.
Rating:
***** Five Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate
word count: 20-25,000 words
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