I Will Survive On My Own, Thankyouverymuch

Published:  August 2nd, 2012

Survive

By: Alex Morel

Razorbill

ISBN-13: 9781595145109

Hatchet meets Lost in this modern-day adventure tale of one girl's reawakening

Jane is on a plane on her way home to Montclair, New Jersey, from a mental hospital. She is about to kill herself. Just before she can swallow a lethal dose of pills, the plane hits turbulence and everything goes black. Jane wakes up amidst piles of wreckage and charred bodies on a snowy mountaintop. There is only one other survivor: a boy named Paul, who inspires Jane to want to fight for her life for the first time.

Jane and Paul scale icy slopes and huddle together for warmth at night, forging an intense emotional bond. But the wilderness is a vast and lethal force, and only one of them will survive.

Review

   Jane comes from a really dysfunctional family - both her Grandma and her Dad killed themselves because of mental illness.  Now Jane has attempted at least twice, so she's been packed off to the hospital where she has to convince the Doctors that she is well enough to go home again.  But Jane is just playing along, so that once she's out of there she manage to actually kill herself without any interference.  On the plane ride home for Christmas, Jane's in the bathroom with her pills getting ready when turbulence knocks her out.  Upon waking up Jane figures out that the plane has crashed and she and the guy next to her, Paul, were the only two that survived.  Now it's up to them to figure out a way to survive until the rescue crews can find them.  In the meantime will Jane figure out that she never really wanted to die and fight for her life for the first time ever?   I went into this book thinking that it was a winner for sure.  A survivalist fiction story, with a heroine who starts out like Charlie in LOST and ends up wanting to live?  If done right, it could have been phenomenal.  It was very sub-par in the way it turned out.  I was majorly disappointed that Jane wasn't really depressed and only treated suicide like a freaking family tradition.  That was very poorly done.  How can you sympathize as a reader with someone whose thought process is that ridiculously stupid???  Then there was the romance with Paul.  It got on my nerves that they barely knew each other, they were both pretty messed up (not to mention he was old enough that she was jailbait) and they ended up falling in 'love' and sleeping together.   Then one of them DIES.  What the hell?!!  The survivalist parts were few and far between compared to the boring build-up and this novel just didn't compare to the expectations that I had built up for it in my mind.  Not one I would recommend for fans of more hardcore books like the Hatchet series, or My Side of the Mountain (which I never considered hardcore per se before reading this piece of trash).  This is a romance masquerading as a survival story.  If you like that sort of thing, have at it by all means.  If not, avoid it like the plague.

VERDICT:  1.5/5  Stars

*  I received this book as part of Around the World ARC Tours, run by the lovely Princess Bookie. No favors or money were exchanged for this review.   This book became available for purchase on August 2nd, 2012.*