Review: The Raft

The Raft by S.A. Bodeen

Publisher: Feiwel and Friends
Publication Date: August 21 2012
Pages: 231
Source: Library
Genre: Contemporary, Adventure
Goodreads

Robie is an experienced traveler. She’s taken the flight from Honolulu to the Midway Atoll, a group of Pacific islands where her parents live, many times. When she has to get to Midway in a hurry after a visit with her aunt in Hawaii, she gets on the next cargo flight at the last minute. She knows the pilot, but on this flight, there’s a new co-pilot named Max. All systems are go until a storm hits during the flight. The only passenger, Robie doesn’t panic until the engine suddenly cuts out and Max shouts at her to put on a life jacket. They are over miles of Pacific Ocean. She sees Max struggle with a raft.

And then . . . she’s in the water. Fighting for her life. Max pulls her onto the raft, and that’s when the real terror begins. They have no water. Their only food is a bag of Skittles. There are sharks. There is an island. But there’s no sign of help on the way.

The moment I began The Raft I could tell that I would have some trouble getting though it. From the very beginning I didn't really like either the main character, or the writing style. The Raft a story about a girl named Robie who is on a small cargo plane when it's motor fails and they go down. She is left with the co-pilot on a raft without fresh water or food and the co-pilot just isn't waking up. Robie must figure out a way to get the two of them to safety before it's too late.

I'm going to start with the things I did like about the story. I usually love survival stories, though this wasn't a love, I still did like the survival plot and did like the overall idea of the story. I also really enjoyed the fact that it was kind of hard to know when to rely on the main character as she slowly becomes unreliable because of the lack of food and water as well as the fact that the co-pilot is unresponsive.

Other than those things, I was really very disappointed with other very important parts of the story. The first thing that I didn't like about the story was the writing and the narrator's voice. The writing wasn't as well put together as many of the books I'm used to reading, so it was very hard for me to get a feel for it. The narrator was also very whiny, she took a lot of things for granted, and really wasn't very interesting. She seemed somewhat spoiled and really didn't have anything that made her a character that would stick with me.

Overall this story really disappointed me. Two of the major pieces of making a story enjoyable were not up to my expectations and I really wish that it hadn't gone that way because I was very excited about this book when I first heard about it.