Survival is an action-adventure story as well as a tale of friendship, loss, courage, and the will to survive.
A group of school friends, some of whom are
related, have been selected to participate in competitions in South Africa in a
number of disciplines. Excited, and ready to represent Nigeria, they are
devastated when their flight is not only delayed, but eventually cancelled.
Luckily for them, another plane is made available and they are soon headed off,
with gold medals in their sights.
However, the plane encounters difficulties
and comes down on the path between Nigeria and South Africa, right in the Congo
jungle area. Those that survived the flight will now have to survive in a place
they have never been in before, hoping that they will be rescued soon. However,
the signal from the plane is not working, and no one knows where they are…
I had high hopes for the story but
unfortunately it didn’t quite deliver. Before even looking at the story itself,
the book is set up (the copy I received) where POV jumps are not marked, so you’d
be in a character’s head in the jungle, and the next thing you’d be in the air
traffic tower or with one of the parents and you’d have to stop and reread
sections to understand where you are. This happened often. Also, there were
sentences that were interrupted by paragraph breaks, so you’d read half the
sentence and then the rest of the sentence would be in the next paragraph. That
interrupted the flow of reading and took the reader out of the story time and
time again. There were a number of grammar and punctuation mistakes that could
be touched up, too.
The author does try to bring across the
sense of despair the survivors feel as well as their triumphs as they find food
or defeat and enemy. He touches on the stirrings of first love as well as the
anguish of losing a family member. I liked how he followed one character’s
inner journey in the progression from “I’m not sure how I am going to survive”
to “I’ll do anything to survive”.
What caught me with the story, though, was
the improbability of the events. Sure, a plane could definitely go down in the
jungle and people be forced to survive. But here you have a group of youngsters
who have no survivalist gear and seemingly no survivalist knowledge able to
spend almost three weeks moving in the jungle and defending themselves from animals
ranging from hyenas to hippopotamuses to gorillas. While it’s not impossible,
the odds of them meeting and defeating the number of animals they did, as well
as the pygmies, seems to be pushing believable boundaries. And I know there had
to be some attempt at rescue, but the signal used for communication… was that
even possible in that area? Some things you could shrug off being in there for
the story, but others I had a hard time believing. It would have been good to
describe how they made shelter and a bit more about what they ate (without
bringing in spoilers, I was really puzzled at how they brought down an animal
that runs at 88 km/h) or even more on the actual survival issues.
I liked the idea of the glossary in the
book, but I think it would have been better at the front. I wouldn’t have known
about it if I hadn’t been told it was there and it would have been frustrating
to get to the end and only find it then. If I recall, it also didn’t have every
translation in it because there is a section where a lot of food is described
that is not in the glossary and I would have loved to know the meanings.
This is the author’s debut novel and he
most certainly has potential. He just needs to work on fleshing out certain
areas and opportunities in future books as well as remembering that “show, don’t
tell” is key!
Thank you to Fearless Storyteller House
Emporium and the author for the opportunity to review the book.
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