Synopsis

When Charles Edison Olson III goes on a voyage with his father, the last thing Charlie expects is a shipwreck. Yet that is exactly what happens. Charlie is forced to survive a full year in a Southeast Asian rainforest with friends: two twelve-year-old boys who are stowaways, a fifteen-year-old Australian boy, a twelve-year-old Southeast Asian girl, and her grandfather. Charlie is forced to leave the safety of family, school, and baseball to be on the run from poachers, criminals, and would-be kidnappers. Charlie enters a world of all things--the good and the bad that affirms, like Charlie, that we all are actors upon the stage of life. He, like us, must become quick studies to retain all that good in us.