A Review By Alice Walden

The Lifeboat is Charlotte Rogan’s debut novel set at the turn of the Twentieth Century. The story revolves around Grace, a determined young woman and the three weeks she spent on an over crowded lifeboat after the ship she was on mysteriously explodes. She is recently married and even more recently widowed. 

There were parts of this book that gripped me, but more that did not. One of the problems that i encountered was, you can never really worry about the fate of Grace and her fellow passengers as you are told in the opening chapter, by Grace herself, that she survived. 

The book builds and goes into such detail about the first few weeks, with each day taking up a chapter, which does give you a feeling of what was going on and the politics and moral issues that were on board the boat. Yet this effect is ruined when the last and perhaps most crucial days are skipped over and merge into one, giving the climax of the story a rather rushed feel. Although this does reflect how the passengers would be feeling at that moment in time, delirious with hunger and thirst. 

I never warmed to Grace as a character, finding her as someone i was unable to relate to. This may well be why i did not get on with this book. In sections of The Lifeboat you can tell that this was a first novel, but the parts you could not show great hope for future works by Charlotte Rogan.