Ten pages into John Shors’ novel “Beside a Burning Sea,” the USS Benevolence is torpedoed and begins to sink. Isabelle and Annie, sisters and nurses on board the ship, struggle to help their wounded patients and escape before they’re trapped within the sinking vessel. To their surprise, a wounded Japanese patient, Akira, speaks to them in English and helps them escape. The girls, with the help of Akira, escape and swim to a nearby uninhabited island. 

Shors’ novel begins, quite literally, with a bang and from there begins to construct deeply developed characters and relationships between the characters that survive the attack. Six of the survivors are members of the crew from the ship, one boy is a stowaway from Fiji, and two of the survivors are aligned with the Japanese military. Shors might have drawn upon the time he spent in Japan as an English teacher to create the Japanese characters and write clearly about the unique differences between Americans and Japanese. 

The prisoner, Akira, is treated somewhat kindly after he helps Annie swim to the island from the ship. These two characters develop a relationship on the island and are considerate of the differences between them. After more than two weeks on the island, the respect Annie and Akira have for each other is reflected in their appreciation of their differences. Akira teaches Annie how to write a haiku and one day Annie asks Akira to write a haiku for her.  She also requests that Akira write it in Japanese. “And I’d like to watch you as you write it. And to listen as you speak it.” This small request symbolizes how well Annie understands that Japanese is a big part of who Akira is. 

The evolution of the relationships changing on the island is not limited to the love that Akira and Annie share. The Fijian stowaway, Ratu, develops a father-son relationship with one of the crewmembers, Jake. Having a child on the island with the other survivors created a new dynamic to the situation and the adults usually responded kindly to Ratu and his childish curiosity and energy. Isabelle, the other nurse, was reunited with her husband Joshua, the captain of the USS Benevolence, on the island after the attack. Without a ship and duties to fulfill, Isabelle and Joshua were able to focus on each other and forget about their obligation to others. 

Overall, each of the characters is well-developed but the ending moves at a much faster pace than the rest of the book. It might be because being stranded on an island is a slow life, but it might also just be an anti-climatic ending.

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