Excerpt from In Extremis by Lindsey Hilsum, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

July 17. Cindy and I went out alone … Boy was it fun … coming back in I made a perfect mooring … Ma saw me. A man on the dock said, "Look at those girls, they're good." Julie says she thinks we made skipper rating. Wow!

For nearly a year her drive for independence was channeled into one project: buying a boat. Her father put up a list of obstacles: she would need a lifesaving certificate and a safety license, and to earn enough money to buy the boat herself. He told Rosemarie he thought this would take her a couple of years, which was fine, as sixteen would be a suitable age. Marie took this as a challenge. She got the lifesaving certificate that summer, began to work toward the safety license, and squirreled away her babysitting money.

July 18, 1969. Put $29 in bank. Now have $79.50!

By May of the following year, she had enough to buy a secondhand Sunfish, a two-person dingy with a triangular sail. The whole family remembers the afternoon a man drove up unannounced with the boat on a trailer; Marie hopping from foot to foot at the front door, oscillating between triumph and nonchalance; her father not knowing whether to be proud or aghast. She was fourteen. She had taken five-year-old Cat into her confidence through the months of plotting. "It was an impossible goal, but she did it," says Cat. "That's what my childhood was like. She'd get you so excited. There'd be a buildup. It was like a conspiracy—every step of the way it was so exciting. And when the boat pulls up, it's like, 'Wow!' To me she was invincible."

Excerpted from In Extremis by Lindsey Hilsum. Copyright © 2018 by Lindsey Hilsum. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.