Review: A harrowing experience for three teenagers
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 21, 2011
Life can get boring for the 524 people who live on the atoll of Atafu, one of the three little islands that make up the nation of Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand.  These little islands are made of coral, so there is no soil, just pieces of broken coral, and Atafu is just 1.4 square miles in area.  There is no place to go, no place to escape, no mall, no movies, no dogs, and the nearest country, Samoa, is twenty-eight hours by ferry away.  It's no wonder that the two fifteen-year-olds and one fourteen-year-old wanted to get off the island.  If the kids looked out from the shoreline, all around the island all they would see would be the ocean.The boys had a clubhouse and although Filo, the unofficial leader of the clubhouse boys, had lived most of his life in Sydney, Australia, his mother had sent him back to the island to live with his father, who was separated from his mother.  His grades had gone down and he was getting into trouble, so going back to Atafu served a dual purpose:  Filo could go to a much smaller school there and his father was the rugby coach and Filo wanted to play rugby.Samu lived on the island with his grandmother. His parents lived in Australia and he had remained behind according to the tradition that one child was chosen to take care of the elderly family members.  Samu had never been off the island.  He had grown up there and had never been under the influence of any of the things that younger kids sometimes got into in big cities like Sydney, where Filo came from.  He was a good boy and a good student until he came under the influence of Filo. These boys were fifteen.In the clubhouse was also Eduina (ed-ween-aye) who was fourteen, and not into the vodka that was being passed around, and unlike the other two boys who both wanted to play rugby, Eduina wanted to be a surgeon. He had lived in American Samoa but moved to Atafu in 2008. He also wanted to escape the boundaries of the island.It was Samu's idea to steal his uncle's new boat with new outboard motor on it.  The other two boys finally said they would go on this challenge to reach the next atoll.  None of these boys had ever been on the ocean without a master fisherman, and it was forbidden for them to do so.  Men had to work to improve their fishing skills to become a master fisherman.  The three boys took vodka, a mayonnaise jar filled with water, a tarp, a lot of coconuts, cigarettes, one tea cup, two bottles of milk, gasoline, and a machete.  They could not find any fishing gear.  They figured that by following the seagulls they would come to land.The rest of the story of these runaway boys is both sad and frustrating to read because of their youth and their bad decisions when they so hastily left in the stolen boat.  These were young boys who thoughtthey knew it all but didn't know a thing about navigating and survival skills.This is a Kindle Single and it suppled me with some pleasureable reading, although at times it was tense since the story of this mission the boys went on got very off course in many ways. I won't give it away, but I recommend this to readers who like adventure or travel reading, and I enjoyed it very much.