Shipwreck

Shipwreck is an adventure novel by Gordon Korman, published in 2001. It puts six children on a small boat for a voyage across the Pacific Ocean that is supposed to last a month, and not one of them has chosen to be there.

The reasons they were sent are all different. One is taking the trip as the only alternative to being sent to a juvenile detention facility for a crime he did not commit, two are quarrelling siblings whose parents hope the voyage will teach them to get along, one was sent by a movie-star father after one prank too many, and another by parents hoping to cure an addiction to television.

The children do not know one another and would not have chosen one another's company, and the voyage gives them no way out of it. Then the boat is wrecked, and the book becomes a survival story in which the group has to stay alive on the water and, later, on land, with the differences between them still unresolved.