Part 1 of a Middle-Grade, three-part, serialized, survivalist novel from 2001, which is frequently, nonsensically and melodramatically poorly motivated
Six teenagers, ranging in age from 13 to 16, Luke, Ian Charla, Will, Lyssa, and J.J, are condemned by their parents (ranging in motivation for their cruelty from desperate to delusional) to be trapped, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on a small, two-masted schooner, the Phoenix, crewed by only a captain and a first mate, for a 4-week, seafaring boot camp for juvenile delinquents called Charting a New Course (CNC).
Luke was set up by a supposed friend to get in trouble with the law by storing a gun in Luke's locker at school. The judge gave him a choice between juvenile detention or CNC. Luke is actually a decent kid, who is consistently capable of both rational decision making and emotional empathy for others.
Ian is a brilliant, scholarly kid, whose favorite pre-CNC activity (in 2001 when there were no ubiquitous cell phones or internet usage) was watching documentaries on the Discovery channel via cable TV. His parents dispatched him to CNC, thousands of miles away and with no way to stay in contact with him for four whole weeks, merely because they decided that he was a geeky little couch potato who needed to get out of the house more. Rather than enrolling him in a local kids' sports club or a class in martial arts, they went to the the utterly improbable extreme of signing him up for a pricey program geared toward dangerous teens with criminal tendencies. Conveniently to the plot, Ian becomes the entire source of practical knowledge about surviving a shipwreck and living on a deserted, tropical island.
Prior to this voyage of the damned, Charla had been on course to become an Olympic swimmer. She also excels at gymnastics and many other competitive sports. She got completely burned out from her physical overachievement and, again, utterly improbably, her parents spent a huge amount of money, that they could ill afford, to send her to CNC, a situation which involves constant, gruelling, enforced labor on the Phoenix. This is definitely not a way to overcome her burnout from excessive physical exertion. However, Charla is conveniently on the Phoenix because her strength and coordination come in handy for group survival during and after the shipwreck.
As a change from the previous three characters, it actually makes sense that Will and Lyssa have been imprisoned on the Phoenix. They are siblings who hate each other so much that they have constantly verbally abused each for their entire lives, and they have regularly escalated that abuse into physically assaulting each other. In the recent past, they went so far as to land each other in the hospital with bloody injuries. It finally became clear to their parents that, if they did not perform some kind of radical intervention, it would be only a matter of time before one of them murders the other. Lyssa is very skilled at engine repair, but Will is incompetent in every possible way. He is a one-dimensional character who exists solely to cause problems, both on the sinking ship, and on the island where they are stranded.
J.J. is the character who most deserves to be on the Phoenix. He is the spoiled, endlessly overindulged son of a major movie star, who has only been saved from juvenile jail on multiple occasions because his father kept buying off the people he harmed. J.J. has poor impulse control and a sociopathic inability to feel empathy for others. His pranks had been getting increasingly destructive, until the most recent one finally convinced his father that he needed to take drastic action. J.J. drove his enormously expensive sports car through the front window of an upscale art gallery, in the process wrecking the car and damaging paintings worth millions and, amazingly, avoided striking a customer. J.J. has been warned that, if he keeps up his impulsive, destructive behavior, someone is going to get killed. Which, of course, is what inevitably happens, because this character conveniently exists, similar to Will, to help ensure that the titular shipwreck occurs.
The Phoenix is small and very uncomfortable for the teenagers. The captain is pleasant to them but the first mate, whom the beleaguered teens nickname, Rat-face, is verbally and physically abusive to them, constantly sneering at them and frequently setting them up to be injured by equipment on the ship. The captain is complicit in these horrendous actions, because he does not interfere to stop or mitigate behaviors that are actual crimes. (Ironically, this is one of the parts of the story that is actually realistic, because teen boot camps of all kinds are notorious for torturing the kids to the point of causing far too many to die from neglect, exposure and injuries.) Ultimately, before this ship sinks, after an enormous storm with 40-foot waves, in which the captain is killed, Rat-face deserts them, taking the lifeboat and half the supplies and leaving them to die on the sinking ship. Within a short period of time, the incompetent, inexperienced teenagers manage to cause an explosion that finishes the job of sinking the Phoenix that the storm began. In the process, it seems as if only four of the teenagers survive. Throughout this installment and the second one, we don't know what happened to J.J. and Lyssa. They are presumed dead.
In furtherance of an exhausting action-adventure plot, this three-part serialized novel is riddled with improbable motivations, actions and situations, as well as endless convenient coincidences.
Having said all that, this is a novel written for children who in are in the 5th or 6th grade, and the obvious authorial presumption is that these are inevitably naive, low-information readers who will enjoy this story in spite of its being an inaccurate, hodgepodge of nonsense. That's not a huge problem for me in this author's comedy, because comedy is all about exaggeration for humorous effect. But in action-adventure, outlandish exaggeration turns what might have been a thrilling and believable plot into an irritating mass of melodrama.
I obtained access to both the ebook and audiobook versions of this series through Hoopla. I decided to give it a try for three reasons: I really like GK's comedies. The narrator, Holter Graham, is a brilliant voice talent whom I was previously familiar with, because he has narrated the Alpha and Omega series by Patricia Briggs. And mainly because it didn't cost me anything. I ended up switching from the audiobook version to skimming the ebook version of this three-part novel just to get through it as quickly as possible, because nothing about it was enjoyable for me.
I believe that reluctant, male readers who are between the ages of 10 and 12 (GK's primary audience of choice) would probably enjoy this series. For them, this would probably be a 4-star read. Unfortunately, I doubt that an intelligent, inquisitive 8-year-old, who is a voracious reader, such as my granddaughter, is likely to enjoy this series for the same reasons I did not. In addition, my granddaughter is currently reading the ultimate shipwreck novel, The Swiss Family Robinson, and this series is not in the same universe of realistic detail regarding survival competency as that classic, 19th century novel.