Lifeboat (Rogan) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Charlotte Rogan manages to distill this drama about what's right and wrong when the answer means life or death into a gripping, confident first novel.... Other novels have examined the conscience and guilt of a survivor among the dead, but few tales are as thoughtful and compelling as this.
Christina Ianzito - Washington Post


Set at the beginning of WWI, Rogan’s debut follows 22-year-old Grace Winter, a newlywed, newly minted heiress who survives a harrowing three weeks at sea following the sinking of her ocean liner and the disappearance of her husband, Henry. Safe at home in the U.S., Grace and two other survivors are put on trial for their actions aboard the under-built, overloaded lifeboat. At sea, as food and water ran out, and passengers realized that some among them would die, questions of sacrifice and duty arose. Rogan interweaves the trial with a harrowing day-by-day story of Grace’s time aboard the lifeboat, and circles around society’s ideas about what it means to be human, what responsibilities we have to each other, and whether we can be blamed for choices made in order to survive. Grace is a complex and calculating heroine, a middle-class girl who won her wealthy husband through smalltime subterfuge. Her actions on the boat are far from faultless, and her memory of them spotty. By refusing to judge her, Rogan leaves room for readers to decide for themselves. A complex and engrossing psychological drama.
Publishers Weekly


First-time novelist Rogan's architectural background shows in the precision with which she structures the edifice of moral ambiguity surrounding a young woman's survival during three weeks in a crowded lifeboat adrift in the Atlantic in 1914.... There are natural deaths and (reluctantly) voluntary sacrificial drownings. Dissention grows.... The lifeboat becomes a compelling, if almost overly crafted, microcosm of a dangerous larger world in which only the strong survive..
Kirkus Reviews