Shipwrecked

Grace Delaney, a 17-year-old from a dance academy in Los Angeles, has been recruited as one of a group to dance for one month on a cruise ship, boarding in Hawaii. Another of the dancers from the same academy is Todd. Although she is going out with Todd, Grace is not sure whether she wants to commit to him. Another male contender for her interest will of course soon appear on the scene.

Grace is excited by the adventure on which she is about to embark, though anxious too about leaving behind her recently divorced mother. She flies to the point at which a small boat is to meet her group and ferry them to the cruise ship. But there is a massive storm and the boat is wrecked with its eight passengers on an island.

The island has a strange effect on Grace. From the moment she steps ashore she feels unreal. The castaways must find out which island they’ve landed on – it turns out to be Blood Island – what secrets it holds and what lessons they may learn about themselves and the others.

Curham has made an interesting authorial choice in the domain of characterisation. The characters of most of the castaways fit so neatly into well-defined, oversimplified stereotypical slots – there is a Paris Hilton lookalike, a hip hop addict, a girl whose life seems perfect but is in fact quite the opposite and a cardboard cut-out of male glamour – that the author must have opted to drain any element of individuality from most of the characters. The only exceptions to this rule are Grace herself and Cruz, the Latino ferryman who got them into this fix.

Cruz is the perpetrator of a memorable ruse. For much of the book he maintains that he speaks only Spanish. His companions pass critical remarks about him in English with total lack of restraint – until he reveals that he is fluent in both languages.

This book may have been written with at least one eye on film producers. It would most likely make a decent movie. But as a novel it bumps along the surface of its narrative, as compared for example with that scary masterpiece Lord of the Flies.