The Killing Sea

December 4, 2006
Lewis (The Flame Tree) sets this rambling novel in northern Indonesia's Aceh, the first area hit by the 2004 tsunami. As the novel opens, 16-year-old Ruslan meets the Bedfords, an American family, when the engine on their sailboat breaks down and they seek out Ruslan's mechanic father in the small harbor town of Meulaboh. The author (who lives in Indonesia and volunteered as a tsunami relief worker in Aceh), provides a chilling description of the disaster that strikes Aceh the next day. Teen Sarah Bedford and her younger brother, Peter, become separated from their parents after being forced to abandon their boat. Meanwhile Ruslan watches villagers disappear under the raging water as he takes refuge on a rooftop and then embarks on a search for his father. Sarah discovers her mother's body and buries her with little emotion (in one of several soap-opera twists, readers later learn that the girl's lack of grief stems from the fact that she read, in the diary her mother kept when she was pregnant with Sarah, "My resentment of this child within me borders on hate"). Ruslan leads the Bedford siblings on a danger-wrought yet curiously lumbering journey to a makeshift hospital, but there is no medicine available for a fever-ravaged Peter. The trio then returns to Meulaboh, where Ruslan is reunited with his father, and Peter gets the medical help he needs. Though Lewis includes ample realistic-sometimes jarringly graphic-detail, unlikely coincidences and overwrought writing ("Something swished its tail in his heart") significantly diminish the narrative's impact. Ages 12-up.