“Help is not on the way. Robie lives with her family on the Midway Atoll, a group of islands in the middle of the Pacific. After visiting her aunt on Hawaii, Robie is left to return home alone. Catching a cargo flight at the last minute, all systems are go until the plane hits nasty weather. And then the plane goes down. And suddenly… Robie’s in the water. Fighting for her life. Max, the only other survivor, pulls her onto a 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. Survival has never been so dizzying, so frightening. And one question remains— how long can they survive?”

~ From the back cover of “The Raft”

“The Raft” by S.A. Bodeen is a book about survival. It follows the main character, Robie, during her time marooned in the Pacific Ocean. Robie deals with a lot of things during this time, including starvation and hallucination, as well as having to face unthinkable things, including almost being eaten by a shark. Robie spends much of the book worrying about how to drink and what to eat due to not having anything in her life raft. She also deals with hallucinations written exceptionally well to the point where you don’t even realize she’s hallucinating until near the end of the book.

“The Raft” also contains quite a bit of knowledge about sea life and how that whole ecosystem works, as the main character’s parents are scientists and they all live on a remote island named Midway Atoll year-round. For example, in one part of the book, Robie says that tiger sharks are scarier than great white sharks because you can never see them coming. She tells a story to support this, explaining how she once watched a bird get eaten when she was younger. This process is used throughout the story and it adds to Robie’s depth and history as a character and allows you to peek into her life and family.

Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen develops and adds depth to her main characters beautifully. One example of this is Robie, who’s character growth which can be seen throughout the story. In the beginning of the book, Robie starts out wanting to rebel from her parents in small, mostly harmless, ways and to have a fun time hanging out with her aunt in the summer. Throughout the book, however, Robie has to learn how quickly priorities can change and how something you did can affect your future in difficult ways.

Many people wonder what it would be like to be in a live or die situation. Afterall, that’s why we have all these books. This book is an attention-grabber right from the start and the author does a wonderful job of writing the book with the mindset of a teenage girl, how we think and what we’d want to do, while also telling a compelling and realistic survival story with great themes. The way the character development is written is excellent, too, and while the side characters aren’t as developed as much as they could be, the main ones are done beautifully. This book is a really quick read, only having a little over two hundred pages, but despite its size, it’s quite the adventure to go on.