The Raft (review)

By cleverly manipulating some adult miscommunications, fifteen-year-old Robie faces the delicious prospect of an unsupervised week in Honolulu. The first twenty-four hours of loneliness and a scary encounter with a street person, however, are enough to send her straight to the airport for the first cargo flight back to her scientist parents on Midway Island. She's the only passenger, and when the plane goes down and the pilot goes with it, Robie is left in the hands of the injured copilot, Max (twenty-something and gorgeous), who inflates the rubber raft, drags Robie onboard by the hair, and promptly passes out. Given that the genre virtually requires sharks, dehydration, hunger, killer sunburn, a deserted island, and at least a touch of sexual tension, it's now up to Bodeen to establish why this particular survival story is the one to pick. Much to her credit, she distinguishes Robie's tale by first creating a largely believable young teen—not bratty, just heedless; not incapable, just unprepared; not lovestruck, just intrigued—and then carefully resisting the authorial urge to imbue her with anything close to the skill set she would need to survive. Just when the raft has been patched, rainwater collected, new nose piercing infected, there's a nifty plot twist involving Max, a guy who needs saving from more than a plane wreck, that should have middle school girls caught somewhere between a gasp! and an ooh! Sure, Robie survives—she's the narrator, after all—but readers who pass this novel around will have lots of fun debating exactly what saves her in the end.