Navigating Grace: A Solo Voyage of Survival and Redemption - Inspirational Memoir for Self-Discovery & Personal Growth" （如果原书是中文作品，翻译后标题应为：） "Navigating Grace: A Memoir of Survival and Redemption - Transformative Journey for Self-Healing & Empowerment

Jeff Jay has written a masterful piece of literary nonfiction that reads like an adventure novel and resonates like an intimate memoir. Jay is an addiction counselor and experienced sailor of Michigan’s Great Lakes when he sets sail to the Virgin Islands with visions of living on his boat and running an on-board halfway house for recovering addicts. His plans and course are diverted, however, when he sails into an unavoidable and torrential storm that about sinks his sailboat and nearly kills him a good dozen times; it’s a gripping read as he knows he will not survive, believes he doesn’t deserve to survive, and yet he does everything he can in case by some miracle he does. He had been saved before, after all, and this was an important theme in the book: Years prior, alcoholism would have killed him had his parents not intervened and got him into a rehabilitation center where he only wanted to drink again and knew he would drink again until all at once, his intellectual mindfulness succumbed to extraordinary spiritual awakening.Jay does not evade or qualify the role of Alcoholics Anonymous in his life. He’s still an addictions counselor and professional interventionist, and this wasn’t his first book published by Hazelden. In fact, as much as I love an artful memoir, if Jeff Jay weren’t also my second cousin and my mom and great aunt hadn’t been in a slight tizzy about what Jay wrote about my grandpa in the book, it’s less than likely that I would have wanted to read a “recovery” book simply due to my own cynicism – a personal story of recovery and redemption, yes, but one published by a world renowned alcohol and drug treatment organization? I had that eerie feeling going into it that I did before reading The In-Between (Goins, 2014) that had a Christian publisher, feeling I had to read on the defensive lest I be brainwashed into cult-like thinking by too much God worship in the prose, but it never happened. Jay’s prose appealed to my cynical side. He’s smart, and honest and brave, and I don’t mean in how he handled his sailboat in that ocean storm alone but with his wordsmithey.He’s a wonderful writer, insightful, poetic. He cleverly juxtaposes the storm with his near death from alcoholism, his father’s passing from leukemia soon after, and more recently his brother’s tragic suicide and then Jay’s divorce, but suicide tends to overshadow everything that comes after it for the survivors, yes? I’ve known that kind of loss and have written about it too, and it’s not easy to express such depth of grief without becoming sentimental or trite. The storm was the perfect metaphor for Jay’s reflections. He wrote probably the best memoir I’ve ever read, and I already mentioned loving this genre, but my master’s degree is in Creative Nonfiction too; I take the craft seriously and have critical expectations. Yet I hung on some of Jay’s sentences for so long that when I did get to the last page, I wept. I both didn’t want it to end and was so grateful to have arrived that it was like his journey had become mine, and we had both survived. And more, he knew I would. That’s how I felt! I just want to thank him so much for sharing his story and making it all of ours. It’s a must read for everyone, and don’t skip the epilogue.