From Goodreads: When 15-year-old Enid Calhoun follows her boyfriend Wick to Maryland for a party, fearful that he might be intending to cheat on her, she finds herself sneaking on board a houseboat where Wick and his friends plan to have a wild night. But before the boys discover their stowaway, a hurricane strikes, and the teenagers are carried miles from the shore and shipwrecked. What follows is a harrowing, yet heartwarming, story of survival, as the teens battle hypothermia, dehydration, man-eating sharks–and along the way, confront their own deepest secrets, including their catalytic roles in the disaster.
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Disney-Hyperion has been extremely gracious in allowing me to read an ARC of this novel prior to its release on June 28^th, 2011.  I found the synopsis of this novel very interesting and was excited to pick it up, especially since I’m deathly afraid of sharks and being shipwrecked is one of my biggest nightmares—a reason I haven’t ever been on a cruise and rarely visit the ocean.

Tracy does a phenomenal job keeping the story afloat (no pun intended) through the dialogue between the eight teens lost at sea.  I will admit that I was filled with trepidation since “lost at sea” novels can be quite boring, balancing the entire story on description, and I am thankful that Tracy didn’t do that in this story.  There was a lot of dialogue and I think that it was quite accurate.  If I was lost at sea on a raft with seven other people, I can see it panning out very similarly.  I’d want to know how many people have been rescued in the past, what we should do to stay alive, how often sharks attack humans, project when we’d be found and, of course, argue.  With eight people in a tightly enclosed space, that arguing is probably going to start sooner rather than later (and I’d probably be a huge proponent of it), and I think Tracy did a great job keeping reader interest.

Now, that being said, I also have to admit that I didn’t necessarily care for any of the characters within the story.  While I did have a sense of foreboding and wished them all well, I never had a deep connection with them in which I really felt there pain, and I think part of the problem is that Enid, the main protagonist, drove me crazy.  Her extreme insecurity was quite obnoxious and, if I were Wick, I would have dumped her too.  I realize that she has a lot going on in her life and her parents’ relationship has a lot to do with her insecurities, but I had a hard time getting past her rash responses to the different situations she finds herself enduring.  It’s almost as if she lacks common sense, and that portion of the novel wasn’t my favorite, which is why, overall, I give this novel three and a half stars.