Adrift: Book Review

So, this week I’ll be reviewing Adrift, by Rob Boffard. Adrift is a standalone novel that fits into a category that my drama teacher once termed “rats in a box.” This means that the novel consists of a bunch of random characters together in an enclosed space, and watching the drama unfold. Other examples of the “rats in a box” category include Reservoir Dogs and 172 Hours on the Moon. In this case, the “Box” is a small tourist ship, and the “rats” are a couple of tourists and their guide.

The tourists include the family of a Senator’s chief of staff, a hotel critic, a retired miner, and a few others. They’re in the middle of their vacation at Sigma Station, which doubles as both a tourist destination and a mining outpost. Sigma station was also apparently the site of a battle between the Federation — an Earth-based empire — and the Colony, a collection of worlds that rebelled against the Federation. So, our “rats” are touring the battlefield in a small ship when a mysterious spacecraft blows Sigma Station — and all the ships around it — to smithereens, leaving the small group of tourists the sole survivors of the massacre. They are then forced to figure out how to get back home in their rinky-dinky craft while avoiding the mysterious ship — which lingers around the area, hunting for survivors.

Now, let me just get my first gripe out of the way; the novel is written in the present tense, which is something that I absolutely loathe. It wasn’t any good when Suzanne Collins did it in The Hunger Games, and it’s not any good now. There are a few novels that have managed it, but I don't feel that Adrift is one of them. Admittedly, this is more of a personal thing than anything else, so maybe it’s not a problem for other people. Still, I feel like I have to point it out.

However, this novel has one massive, glaring problem; as I mentioned before, this is a character-driven novel, where tension is built by the interactions between the characters as they react to the events around them. Now, here’s the problem; the characters are, quite frankly, crap.

While Boffard doesn’t have worst-written characters I’ve ever seen, they are very, very far from the best. One of the characters, for example, is an eleven year old named Corey who acts like he’s at least fourteen. Most of the characters have arcs that are just too exaggerated to be believable. It also feels like most of the time, the characters are just preforming actions because the author says “that’s what has to happen next,” not because those actions match up with their character in any way. Even worse, I just didn’t care about any of the characters. I just couldn’t manage to care whether they lived or died, and in a character-driven novel, there is no greater crime.

While plot of the novel is fairly original, it also has many of the same tired tropes that I’ve seen elsewhere. At the end of the novel (mild spoiler warning follows), the main characters even have a “gotcha!” moment where they confront the bad guy, and expose his crimes to the world in what feels like an incredibly clichéd moment that’s been taken straight out of every movie ever (example: the ending of White House Down). Spoiler alert over. And speaking of plot, let’s talk about the world building — which is, in my opinion, one of the most important parts of any sci-fi or fantasy novel.

The universe of the Adrift suffers from one of the same problems as the characters; I just didn’t give a damn about it. I wanted to, but I didn’t. On one hand, you have the Federation — an Earth-based Republic which went to war because the Colonies didn’t want to give it free stuff (I can’t imagine why they rebelled). But it’s okay, because the Colony leadership is a bunch of dictators who will nuke innocent civilians on a whim. Maybe this was part of an attempt to have a morally gray universe and show how every story has two sides, but if so, then that angle was critically under-explored.

Here’s the thing about Adrift; it’s not the worst novel I’ve ever read. But it’s a waiting-room book. What I mean by that is that if you’re in a waiting room for two hours straight, it will keep you from being bored, but that’s about all it’s good for. It’s also sixteen dollars, which makes it a pretty pricey buy for a paperback. So, if you’ve got a waiting room to go to and don’t have anything else you’d rather be reading, give it a go. Otherwise, give it a pass.

2/5 Stars.