According to the National Geographic Society, there are no fewer than 50 bodies of salt water on Earth that are currently named as seas. Some are landlocked, but most are connected, encircling all the continents of our planet.

While each sea has its differences of size, depth, subterranean geology and climatic features, Hannah Stowe, in her captivating memoir, seems to engage with the sea as a vast singular entity with infinitely varied yet connected moods, textures and challenges --- a borderless experience that literally does move through her psyche like water.

"Instead of pleading desperately for 'ordinary' folks like us to become involved, [Stowe] offers a welcoming invitation that promises not only challenges, but also joy and fulfillment. For me, that started with reading this beautifully composed book."

Artist, sailor, environmentalist, marine biologist, researcher, and with a good deal of philosopher-pilgrim in her makeup, Stowe writes her autobiography of life in, around and through half a dozen of the world’s seas with a combination of engaging vulnerability and rock-solid facts about what ails marine ecology in the 21st century.

Punctuated with gentle pencil drawings and matching titles, mostly of seabirds and cetaceans encountered on sailing research journeys, Stowe’s seven chapters are reflective rather than strictly chronological. As she grows from childhood beach ramblings on the Welsh coast, to crewing and piloting sailing vessels in all kinds of weather, to struggling through a devastating back injury that threatened to end her seagoing life, to completing a much-interrupted university degree, MOVE LIKE WATER often takes on a mystical quality of inner travel, even in times of extreme external physical challenge.

A particularly appealing, and even reassuring, quality of Stowe’s writing is her ability to engage with sea creatures whose names will be familiar to most readers --- sperm and humpback whales, various kinds of seals, dolphins, birds such as albatross and shearwater --- in a deeply intimate way without anthropomorphizing them. Most of her chapters are named for such creatures yet are not solely about them. These sections are more about what their existence has taught her, and can teach us, if we care enough to observe them closely in their natural environment.

Interwoven with expressions of wonder at their surprising adaptability and the enormous journeys that seabirds, whales and other marine creatures undertake to preserve their species, Stowe includes frank and urgent descriptions of how human abuse of seas all over the planet has threatened virtually every life form that lives in them.

At the end of MOVE LIKE WATER, after summing up her own life and looking to a future that could go in a number of different directions (but always sea-related), Stowe offers readers a thoughtful coda on what is really a glorious major- and minor-key hymn to all things marine.

Neither angry rant nor hopeless lament, Stowe balances her research knowledge with the well-founded hope that many seemingly insignificant human lifestyle choices can indeed add up to major positive changes in the health of all the world’s seas. Instead of pleading desperately for “ordinary” folks like us to become involved, she offers a welcoming invitation that promises not only challenges, but also joy and fulfillment. For me, that started with reading this beautifully composed book.