If there is one movie I’ve seen all year that I hope my granddaughter Robin gets to see one day, it would be “Maiden,” one part adventure thriller, one part heart-rending feminist story, one part fairy tale.

And it’s all true.

If you to go see this movie, bring tissues. Maria used up her tissues, and I held it in until the last inspiring and deeply moving moments. This is the story of 24-year-old Tracy Edwards, a yachting cook and helper who wanted to learn to sail and who hit an iron wall of patronizing, sexist and arrogant men.

In the ’80s there were virtually no women in the sport of yachting, and Tracy decided against all conceivable odds to get her hands on a yacht and compete in the Whitbread (now called the Volvo Ocean Race), the at 30,000 miles the longest contest in any sport on the earth.

Enraged at being treated like a slave or servant on the few boats that would hire her, she decided to enter the famed Whitbread as a “proper sailor” and with an all-woman crew. No one gave them a chance – not to get a boat, compete, or survive two days in the grueling contest.

No one would sponsor or support a woman, let alone a 24-year-old cook, so after several years of rejection,  she decided to find her own run down the second-hand boat and hire an all-female crew, the first in the history of the sailing sport. She and her mates were ridiculed and dismissed by unnerved and contemptuous men – they could not bear the thought of competing with women or being beaten by them.

Although an older Edwards says in the film that she understands now that she was always a feminist, she didn’t see herself that way back in 1989. “I like to do what I want to do and I didn’t see why I couldn’t do it.”

The movie is a mix of thrilling and sometimes even frightening footage – a movie photographer was on board. The racing footage is beautiful and sometimes heart-stopping.

At the heart of this poignant and stirring movie are the present-day interviews with Skipper Edwards and almost all of the members of her 12-woman crew, all of whom are candid and honest about the extraordinary experience of their months-long race around the world.

Even though we know from the first that they survived, there is enormous suspense in the movie; about their survival but also about how they ultimately fared in the race.

I won’t give the ending away here. I was surprised by the power of this film. I expected it to be a documentary about a sailing race, but it is so much more than that, it has enormous contemporary social resonance.

These are brave, even heroic women and even though the reporters tried, again and again, to trivialize them as being emotional and unstable intruders in a man’s world and mans sport, they were anything but.

They helped to transform the very idea of the female athlete and blew to bits the stereotype of women as being too weak,  fragile or unstable to compete with men. There were a lot of words eaten once Edwards and her crew entered the race.

My favorite and most revealing interviews were with Joanna Gooding, the “Maiden’s” cook and a friend of Edwards since they were 14 years old. She gently and honestly explained her friend, a troubled kid who became great.

The now older reporters who covered the race were fascinating, each admitting to being staggered at the very idea of women entering the Whitbread, let alone competing.  The same was true of the competing crews. Some of the men still couldn’t seem to handle what Edwards did.

“They said we weren’t strong enough, not skilled enough, girls don’t get on, you’ll die,” Edwards relates, still angry at the thought decades later. “It wasn’t a choice, it was something I had to do.”

Edward’s message to young women was clear and stirring: when somebody tells you, you can’t do something you really want to do, do it. She also talked about the ocean wanted to kill them every step of the way. There were some casualties in the race.

Edwards has a compelling back story. Thrown into crisis after her father died when she was ten and her mother married an alcoholic and abusive stepfather, she turned into a kind of teenaged troublemaker. She was suspended from her high school in Wales 26 times before finally being expelled and running away from home for good.

They say if trouble doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. It made Edwards stronger.

As if this wasn’t compelling enough, the movie – beautifully directed by Alex Holmes – gives full and riveting weight to each of Whitbread’s six legs and the nail-biting and dramatic elements every one of them contained, from raging storms and mountainous seas to cracked masts and overboard sailers.

I highly recommend the movie, which I loved.

Two complaints: The critical funding Tracy Edwards to enter the race came from an unlikely last-minute source, the late King Hussein of Jordan.

Tracy said they met on a boat and stayed in touch with one another for some years. He gave her the million dollars she needed to get a second-hand boat she managed to acquire. I felt this needed explaining: how a 24-year-old cook on a boat became pals with one of the most powerful rulers in the Middle East and was given a million dollars to get her boat ready for the Whitbread.

What was this then troubled young woman and the Jordan King  “in touch” about?

If one is doing so honest and tell-all a movie – and this one was that – I felt that this relationship – key to her competing –  was glossed over in a way that made me uncomfortable.

I’m a former journalist, I would have wanted to know more about that. I wasn’t aware that Kind Hussein, who was quite famous and quite ruthless,  was that nice or generous.

The other was that throughout the movie, the women crew of the “Maiden” complained that journalists only wanted to know about their emotions, how they were getting along with each other if there were “spats” among them. They were never asked about their sailing skills or tactics, like the male sailors on the other boats.

Yet not once in the movie did Edwards or any member of her crew say a thing in any detail about their tactics and sailing skills, skills that took them through some of the most dangerous waters on the earth for months at a time.

That was surprising and disappointing to me since almost every one of the affecting interviews dealt with the emotions of the women in the crew.

It was very compelling stuff,  but I realized later that Holmes was, in a way, doing what the crew was complaining about – telling the story of these women mostly in terms of their feelings and emotions, just as they had complained the reporters did in 1989.

Five or ten minutes on sailing strategies and skills would have done if for me, I wanted to know more.

Despite those two issues, “Maidens” is a wonderful movie, I recommend it highly, and I can’t imagine a better movie to take your sons and daughters to see. It shines a light on the plight of women through our history, and also tells us a lot about some of the pioneers of the ongoing and continuing revolution by the women in our world.

And about their strength. If you ever doubted that women can do anything men can do, this movie will help to persuade you.

Best of all, it encourages all of us to follow our dreams, even when they seem too expensive, difficult, or impossible to achieve.