The Raft

The Raft, by S.A. Bodeen, tells the castaway story of Robie, a young woman who survives an airplane crash in the Pacific Ocean. The crash occurs as she attempts to return from a trip to visit her aunt in Honolulu.

The story is set in motion when Robie’s aunt is called away for workand allows Robie to remain at her apartment unsupervised. Robie is attacked on the sidewalk outside her aunt’s building by a man who mistakes her for someone else, and she is overwhelmed by fear. Deciding she has had enough independence, she goes to the airport and gets on the next cargo flight to a smaller Hawaiian island called Midway. Neither her parents nor her aunt know that she has boarded the flight. As the plane gets closer to home, it faces severe turbulence, loses an engine, and eventually crashes into the Pacific Ocean. Robie and the young copilot, Max, are able to jump from the plummeting plane with the survival raft before the plane sinks beneath the surface of the ocean.

Robie then faces a series of challenges in order to survive. Equipped with little but her wits, the raft, and a survival guide tucked into the raft’s storage compartment, she must learn tricks to avoid starvation, dehydration, and sharks. Max is not a very helpful companion: he is slumped unconscious on the other side of the raft. Robie tries to wake him and does not succeed. She eventually goes through his belongings to find something that will help them both survive.

After a few days on the raft, Robie and Max are both conscious and they talk about their lives. Eventually, the current draws them close to an island called Lisianski, and they wash ashore. The island is uninhabited, so they use their wits to survive, facing hunger, thirst, storms, and sharks. Robie eventually realizes that the “Max” she’s been getting to know over the past few days is merely a hallucination—his stories and life details Robie herself has filled in by what she gleans from the therapy journal he carried. The real Max has been dead since the day of the crash. Left truly alone on the island, Robie battles madness and manages to cling to sanity by focusing on her signal fire. Ultimately, she gets rescued by a crew of marine biologists. When she returns home, her perspective on the luxuries of human civilization and the significance of her family in her life has changed forever. The book ends with an unexplained mystery: Robie finds herself wearing a pendant of Max’s, though she doesn’t remember taking it, and he never gave it to her.