The biggest problem I had with this book is that within the entire story there was never any defining moment. The book is supposedly about a professor who is an atheist, who goes down in a plane crash along with his long-time girlfriend and several other passengers. The professor volunteers to swim to the nearest island (some 14 miles away) to get help. While he's swimming, he sees a man, calmly treading water, always in front of him, urging him on. So now the obvious question arises: Was this a vision? Some kind of divine intervention? Or was it a hallucination, brought on my dehydration and exhaustion?

I think this book would have been a lot better if the professor -- at any point in the story -- would have seriously questioned his atheism. Even if he had decided, in the end, that there still was no God, the internal conflict could have been a fulcrum of the story. Instead, after everyone is rescued, the professor continues on with his regular life, insisting that the man he saw was a hallucination brought on by physical taxation. There is never any moment where he waivers from his atheism. Within the story of course there are other characters and other things happening, but while you get the feeling that they are all supposed to somehow come together, it never actually happens. Even at the very end of the book, with it's explosive climax, nothing is really resolved.

So while I actually really liked the story part of the book and the characters were great, the entire production lacked any cohesiveness and kind of left me wondering what the point had been.