Swept Away

Swept Away #1

by Dafydd ab Hugh

Beginning a six-day hike with her best friends in order to get away from it all, Jeanette finds her plans disrupted when a pair of unwanted jocks joins the party and a flash flood threatens all their lives. Original.

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Dafydd ab Hugh (born David Friedman) is a U.S. science fiction author.

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well. I picked this book up at some book sale and decided to read it now. In a way it was difficult for me to get inside the main character's life but it was easy to feel the terror of what happens in the book. The book ends before the adventure is anywhere near through, which I'm sure is a ploy to get the reader to buy the next book. I don't like that. This book is 11 years old and I may never find the second book. I understand now that it's a trilogy. For that reason I gave it 3 stars.

Also, some elements were difficult to believe. Jeanette is 17 and in high school, I believe, when she decides to go on a 6 day hike across treacherous mountains in heavy rain accompanied by her friends Samma and Neil. Samma and Neil are a couple but Neil is her best friend. At the last moment a friend named Bill, whom she and Neil hadn't seen since childhood, shows up and decides to go with them. First of all, I would never allow my daughter to go off on such a hike. Then another boy, Dwayne, who is a hunky not very bright athlete interested in Jeanette (but she isn't interested in him), shows up on the trail. So there are 5 hikers and two of the boys are vying for Jeanette's attention. The cover shows 4 kids on a narrow cliff, not 5. And this scene doesn't happen in the book. A dam breaks and all the kids are swept away. In this book we never learn what happens to Samma and Neil. Starving, freezing, and thirsty, Dwayne, Bill, and Jeanette find each other. But slowly Jeanette begins to fear that Bill is a homicidal maniac. The author was really able to get fear across in this book. Bill completely creeped me out. And the book just ends there.

[Robbie Quattrocchi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually heard about this book from my older brother many moons ago (Bush II was president), but we could not nail down the title for almost two decades. All my brother had to go on was a vague recollection of the book's cover and color.

I would have absolutely loved this book if I had read it as a teenager. I still enjoyed it for what it is, a pulpy teenage novel written by a man who now makes his living writing pulpy sci-fi adaptations of series.
Truth be told, I probably appreciate it more because I had to work to find it.

Not to mention that having worked my way through high school and college, I could better understand where the main character was coming from on an emotional level. She's sort of shallow, but unsure of herself when it comes to relationships; like most adolescents in general.

I liked that the author did not try to emulate teens of the time by giving them silly dialogue loaded with West Coast slang as well. Also the setting makes it sort of timeless, in that being stuck on a mountain during a flash flood would knock out any real means of communication anyway. The only technology that stood out was the presence of a Walkman.

As I read it, I was ticking off all of the signs of psychopathy that our antagonist was exhibiting, and he hit all of them quite hard. It actually felt a little on the nose, but this IS teenage literature afterall; subtlety is not a factor.

I can definitely see that this is the first book in a trilogy, because the author setup a lot of things that have yet to pay off.