What is Raft People about?
Raft People, by author ML Katz, is a story of how a global catastrophe, like rising sea levels, affects a few average people in a Texas Gulf Coast suburb. Having been through some disasters, I know that there is a period of time when the average person just has to “shelter in” and fend for themselves. Government and community services are too tight to help everyone.
These can be difficult times because we have to live without basic services like electricity and emergency transportation. These are also times when neighbors tend to bond. So, in my memory, these disasters have been the worst and the best of times!
The narrator is Liz Green. She is a rebellious and troubled teenager at the start of the Great Flood. Liz Green lives with her brothers and her single mother. As her family tries to cope with impending disaster, Liz must battle her own serious mental illness. She is aggravated by the disaster and the fact that she is running low on medication! As her problems mount, she begins to mature and find her competition, but the trauma of her experiences may be something she will never really get over.
Since bad luck must be balanced with a little good luck, Liz Green’s neighbors include a veterinarian, an ex-Navy diver, and an ex-naval engineer. Her own brother, Mark, is a quiet and unsociable boy who also happens to be a sage when it comes to engineering and construction.
Escape routes are obstructed or blocked by stalled traffic. The army and the state government are totally overwhelmed trying to deal with millions of people in the endangered areas. Meanwhile, a website called RaftPeople.com help ordinary people cope with the disaster by creating a community of threatened people who plan to build their own homemade crafts so that they can float out of the flooded areas.
Was Raft People a good book?
If you’re looking for zombies or gore, you may not appreciate Raft People. It is a realistic representation of the gradual disintegration of society as millions try to evacuate and basic services are lost. If you like a good novel with realistic characters that you really care about, I think you’ll enjoy this story as much as I do!
This book is not a fast-paced thriller, but rather a detailed narrative that slowly sucked me in until I couldn’t stop reading to find out what happened next.
What kind of book is Raft People?
This book fits into the loose genre of science fiction, although it would be more accurate to apply the stricter categories of post-apocalyptic, dystopian, and adventure. It’s also a coming of age story about family relationships. Ordinary people may not become supermen, but they manage to outdo themselves to deal with the impending disaster.
It also gives you some hints about what the future holds for the main characters. They learn to subsist, or even thrive, in a much changed society. They have many more problems to deal with, but the human spirit endures and they cling to hope and deal with their memories of the past.
