The Raft
Robie leads a sheltered life; away from people her own age and away from television out on a group of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with her parents. For a teen, that has to be hell or close to it, but Robie makes the best of it knowing that in a few years she will leave the islands and live amongst other individuals again. I don’t know how long I could survive in Robie’s shoes as a teenager but I joke now, that with my TBR pile growing by leaps and bounds daily, living secluded like that as an adult, I would find plenty to do. Robie does spend a lot of her time on the Midway Atoll researching wildlife so that when her parents have company stop in, she could join in on the conversations. Someone should have given her a book about survival or better yet, her parents should have taught her some basic survival technique while living out there in the middle of the Pacific. If they had only known what her future would entail, they could have prepared her better. When returning home from a visit to her aunts in Hawaii, Robie finds herself floating in a yellow life raft in unknown waters. Her return trip just got more interesting. Robie knows some trivia about ocean life but not much about survival so when she is thinking through her trivia trying to make it through another day, I am thinking about how I would survive after watching all the survival shows on TV. I really felt that I needed to be there for her and my inner voice was pushing Robie along as she floated in that raft hoping to find someone or somewhere to land. The pacing was fast and I had to remember what type of character Robie was. I really felt sorry for her at times, it wasn’t as though she was immature; Robie was just scared, desperate and hadn’t been exposed to as many opportunities as the rest of us had.
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