Book Review No: 15 Marooned on Mogmog by Jennifer Barrie

Having read an excerpt of this book (I think it was in the Woman's Weekly), I was happy to come across it in the library as it sounded like an amazing, adventurous story. Like some of the other reviewers I found that it didn't quite live up to its premise - but it was still an interesting tale that kept me interested from beginning to end.
The Barrie family, from Perth in Western Australia, had planned and saved for their dream two year sailing adventure for a long time. Meticulous in their planning and equipment they were fairly confident nothing too drastic would go wrong. Unluckily for them, it did. Caught up in a severe storm, their boat was washed up on a coral reef on the remote Micronesian island of Mogmog. After salvaging their boat with the help of the locals, they then made Mogmog their home for the next several months as they worked to repair their floating home and resume their adventure.

On the positive side, Marooned on Mogmog is an easy read. It is written in relatively simple language and has a good flow and chronology to it. I had no problems progressing through the story and was genuinely interested in what was going to happen next. I thought you got a reasonable sense of who the author was and the impact the shipwreck had on her and her family.
On the flip side, the switching between tenses mid paragraph was a bit confusing. I could see she was recalling stuff as it happened (like a diary entry in present tense), but would then switch to past tense in recalling other information. The diary entries could have worked, but needed to have been included separately with the chapters formed around them.
Similarly the overuse of exclamation marks and abbreviations such as "ish" (for eg there were 10ish kids playing) didn't really work. Once again I can see that the author is trying to use her everyday speech and make it as genuine an account as possible, but although she may speak that way, when it is written down it is quite grating.
Finally the author's attitude to the locals is a bit hard to take at times. I do understand this is a personal (and honest) account, however if you are to believe they set off on their adventure as true free spirits with a love of travel and other cultures, then that has to mean an acceptance of differences between cultures (whether you agree with their culture or not). That's not to say she couldn't have pointed these differences out - it could have been done in a more subtle way.
Overall I thought this was an intereesting book that appealed to my adventurous side and had me wondering how I might have coped in the same situation. It's just a shame it wasn't given better editing and a bit more thought about how the story could have been told in a more positive way. Definitely worth a read though.