Overboard

Inspired by a real-life ferry accident in which hundreds drowned, American author Elizabeth Fama’s young adult novel Overboard (2002) follows 14-year-old Emily Slake as she battles to survive in the sea off the coast of Indonesia. The daughter of aid workers, Emily has little sympathy for native Indonesians and their culture, but as she shares her ordeal with 10-year-old local boy Isman, she gains a new respect for Indonesians and for Islam. Hailed by some reviewers as “a powerful exploration of the will to live” (Kirkus Reviews), Overboard was criticized by others for its “muddled, cumbersome prose,” and for being “heavily reliant upon coincidences” (Publishers’ Weekly).

Fourteen-year-old Emily Slake has been dragged halfway around the world from her native Boston by her parents, humanitarian doctors who work for World Physicians for Children. In the northern Sumatran town of Banda Aceh, Emily is fed up with the constant mosquito bites, the unrelenting humidity, and the lack of space, privacy, and friends. To make matters worse, her parents are desperately overworked and have little time for Emily.

She has little interest in getting to know the locals. A young Muslim man who works at her parents’ clinic, Madjid, asks Emily if they can hang out so he can practice his English, but she refuses. Although she helps out at the clinic, she struggles to find common ground with the patients. When the muezzin at the local mosque chants the call to prayer, she covers her ears: to her, the noise is ugly and foreign. Instead, she spends all her time dreaming of Boston and longing to get back there.



So, when Emily receives word that her Uncle Matt is vacationing at a resort on the nearby island of Weh, she is sorely tempted to ditch her parents’ worthy efforts to go hang out on a beach.

At first, she resists this temptation, until one day at the clinic a young girl called Rabina dies. Emily can’t be sure her carelessness hasn’t caused Rabina’s death, and she flees the clinic. Unsure what to do, she boards an overcrowded ferry for Weh. She’s confident that she’ll arrive in time to phone her parents to let them know where she has gone. They usually don’t notice whether she’s around anyway.

Most of the passengers on the ferry are locals, and Emily avoids them, instead striking up a friendship with an elderly British couple, Katherine and Richard. Emily has lived in Indonesia for two years, and by now she has absorbed enough of the local language and culture to recognize that Katherine and Richard are shockingly ignorant of how to behave here and arrogantly unconcerned about it.



The seas are rough, and the ferry begins to list to “an unnatural angle.” Suddenly the ferry’s crew are distributing life jackets. As she puts hers on, Emily spots a young Indonesian boy clinging to the ship’s railing, frightened to enter the water. Confident in her swimming ability, Emily gives her life jacket to the boy and sets off to find a new one for herself.

However, as the ship rapidly begins to sink, Emily finds herself trapped in the empty life-jacket locker. It fills with water: “The next thing she remembered was being near the surface, choking, searching for air, and then vomiting. How could she be sick in the water without holding on to anything? It was a joke; she was heaving and drowning at the same time.”

A strong swimmer, Emily, manages to reach the surface. There she witnesses terrible scenes. Most of the women, burdened by religiously modest clothing and unable to swim, are drowning. So are the children. Those who can swim fight to wrestle life jackets from those who can’t. There is a vicious fight for spaces on the life-rafts.



Emily swims for hours in the warm water, avoiding the fights and the shark-fins that slice the water in the near distance. For a while she is reunited with Katherine and Richard, only to lose them again. She removes her leggings and turns them into a makeshift flotation device. At one point, she encounters a young woman on the brink of drowning and tries to rescue her—but the woman is simply exhausted and in despair. Despite Emily’s best efforts, she sinks below the waves.

Exhausted after swimming all night, Emily finds herself alone except for a small boy in a life jacket. At first, he threatens to set sharks on her if she tries to take his jacket, but then he recognizes Emily is the person who gave him the jacket in the first place.

The boy’s name is Isman, and he and Emily float together. Emily uses her strength and know-how to keep them alive, while Isman contributes a quiet strength that comes from his devout Muslim faith. When a fellow survivor offers Isman a piece of candy, he initially refuses, because it’s Ramadan. He worries that he doesn’t know what time it is, so he can’t time his prayers. He recites the 99 names of God as a prayer. Little by little Emily comes to appreciate Isman’s faith.



Together they make it to an island, where Emily is reunited with her parents. Isman is not: they were lost at sea. Emily and her parents promise to take care of him.