A great read. It is suspenseful. You keep getting bits of what's coming, and at the end you still can't say what the truth is. I really enjoyed the moodiness and indecency of the main character. Someone I would love to have as my frenemy.

I thought this book was great. Wonderfully written, suspenseful, thought-provoking. My favorite kind of book. I would categorize this book as literature, where much of the "action" of the book is in the language and the subtle characterization. If that's not your thing, you may not enjoy this book as much as I did.

What an unusual subject for a novel! At first I was kind of afraid to read it because I don't like reading about suffering. So I dipped into the end first and then went back and read the whole thing. Glad I did.

Not a bad book for it's kind, but it could have been better. Told in first person narrative, it never really fleshes out the actions and reactions of the survivors on a lifeboat. The "murder" referred to in most of the book was senseless. Why eject the only person with any seagoing experience from the lifeboat? And frankly none of the characters seemed humane enough to warrent my caring about them, even the narrator herself, who comes across as much more machiavellian than anyone else on the boat. If you don't like the characters in a novel, then you don't really care about the outcome.

At first this was a bit slow going for me, but by the end I was hooked, and really enjoyed the questions it raised.

Many layers and great foreshadowing make Lifeboat a complex and suspenseful read.

I don't think Rogan wanted to write about a lifeboat, per se. I think she had a message she wanted to get out, she wanted to make a comparison between behavior in a lifeboat (in a life and death situation) and ordinary life--she wanted to talk about what humans do on the extremes of life and how that relates to normal life. But starting to write, she had to get through actually talking about time in the life boat before she could do what she wanted. The discussion of life on that boat begins dry, boring. We know next to nothing about the characters--including the narrator, and even less that made me care about them (any more than I want anyone in such a situation to make it out alive). I eventually cared closer to the trial. I thought she actual shone there, when she could talk about how the first two thirds of the book impacted the main character. I think she might have written a decent short story focusing only on part of the book, with more limited references to the time on the life boat, or a cut down narrative interspersed. But as it was, it took 200 pages before I cared. And before a book can be regarded on the strength of the message, of the more literary merits, it has to have an enjoyable story, engaging characters--the basics. I also think there were problems with the 'literary' aspects. Rogan tries to bring in literary techniques in the organization, interspersing large sections or chapters of other detail into the main narrative. This threw me for a loop because I really can't see the main character/narrator employing anything but a straight forward narrative. And that infidelity to the character is odd, because it seemed to me that Rogan's over fidelity to the framing device (the narrator's account of her time on the life boat as an account for her lawyers and potentially for the trial) was a reason why the account was boring, why I didn't care about the characters.

I liked this book. Big time character study, so if you like action and drama, this wouldn't be for you.

This book had great potential but I did not feel like the author did a good job of developing the characters or their relationships.

Interesting character study, reminded me of Emma Donaghue.