This was a crazy, absolutely insane story and I have nothing but respect for the survivors, but this book was sometimes a slog to get through. It was written kind of like a long form article, without a lot of emotion or story building. It might it harder to connect to the characters, so it didn't have a big emotional impact when stuff happened to them. I did like how they didn't sugar coat things or try to cover up stuff that they had to do in order to survive.

In the chapters that talked about the search for the plane I wish there would have been more commentary about how close they made it to the plane's actual crash site. Admittedly, I'm terrible with geography but it would have been way more meaningful to me if I knew if the searchers were close at all or if they were completely in the wrong area. And honestly I really never knew, but that may have been a me problem. I did try to help myself with this by constantly flipping to the map (by the preface) whenever they mentioned towns or volcanoes that they were near, but I still didn't do a great job.