STRANDED!

Two amateur explorers become stranded on a newly formed volcanic island when the fishing boat that drops them off fails to come back.

“Iceland,” the author writes, “is a small and beautiful island in the middle of nowhere” with plenty of volcanoes—including one dubbed Surtsey, newly emerged from the sea, that his grandfather and a friend one day impulsively think would be a noteworthy place to visit and photograph. And so it turns out to be despite the ground’s boot-melting heat and a total lack of food or fresh water, which become issues when their return ride fails to show up. Still, when the night turns cold, sleeping next to a volcano is a perfect idea for keeping warm, right? (“It really isn’t.”) A day and a night later, the weary explorers reach the top of a hill…and find a friendly, dark-skinned man from America waiting with a helicopter to take them back to the mainland! How’s that for wishes come true? Using a storyteller’s tricks as well as tone, Benediktsson swears there’s only one thing in his yarn that isn’t true…and that, he waits to the end to reveal, was the color of his forbear’s melty footwear. Wilson sets the hapless, light-skinned duo in a forbiddingly rocky landscape depicted in lurid hues and lines that wriggle and flow in suggestively molten ways, where lava dances “like some fire red northern lights.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Definitely a case of fools rushing in, made all the funnier by its scary bits.