“The Summer I Dared,” by Barbara Delinsky; Simon & Schuster; hardcover, $24.95

Why was she chosen to survive?

When an event strikes us, be it love or disaster, all the small details and decisions seem to have led us unwittingly to the conclusion.

When Julia Bechtel missed the car ferry to Big Sawyer Island and, instead, boarded the Amelia Celeste, a lobster boat turned passenger ferry, she did not know that the smallest decision made that day would mean her survival.

Barbara Delinsky’s novel “The Summer I Dared” opens with the Amelia Celeste pulling out into Maine’s Penobscot Bay with nine passengers on board.

The fog is thick, but the captain had been on these waters his entire lifetime and has no worries about delivering his passengers safely.

Julia turns down the seat offered by one of the passengers and goes to stand in the bow. Noah Prine, who had been bickering with his father, leaves him seated in the stern and goes to cool his temper in the bow.

When a pleasure craft with its captain dead at the wheel comes out of the fog and slices the lobster boat in two, Julia’s and Noah’s decisions to stand in the bow saves their lives.

Recognizable, at first

Thrown clear of the boat, the two survivors stay afloat until a fleet of lobster boats arrives to pull them from the water.

Set onshore and put into the care of her islander aunt, Julia insists on waiting with the other islanders for survivors. Besides herself and Noah, only one other woman returns to the island alive.

When Julia boarded the boat, she was instantly recognizable to the other passengers as being from “away.”

Everything from her manicured fingernails to the shoes on her feet pegged her as the Manhattan woman she was.

Waiting on the shore, though, Julia is completely transformed. Her wet clothes replaced by her Aunt Zoe’s clothes, her hair stuck in a Foss Fish and Lobster hat and her eyes straining into the fog, Julia looks like any islander.

Everything that identified Julia, her purse, her car keys and her luggage, are now at the bottom of the bay.

It is inevitable that a person who survives when others do not feels as if they survived for a reason. The shock of the accident took away not only the physical objects that identified her, but would also take away her steadfast identity as a good and obedient daughter, wife and mother.

As a child, Julia’s mother left her to do the mothering and running of the house. As a wife, she was equally depended on and taken advantage of.

Her husband, a driven professional, saw Julia mostly as a woman to support his lifestyle. Julia pressed his suits, organized his parties and ignored his extramarital affairs.

Already changing

As the hours, days and weeks pass after the accident, Julia builds a new identity. The one closest to the tragedy, Noah, will become her constant companion. He will know Julia as impulsive and independent rather than obedient. When her daughter comes to find her on the island just days after the accident, she already finds her mother transformed. The reader may sometimes tire of Julia’s constant self-evaluation and her somewhat predictable life changes, but they will not tire of the novel’s setting.

The author paints an excellent picture of Maine island life and the lobstermen and artists who cohabit it. From the portrait of Noah, a troubled, but caring man who returned to his childhood home to work beside his lobsterman father, to the portrait of Aunt Zoe, the black sheep of Julia’s family who raises angora rabbits, Delinsky has captured a community. Her descriptions of lobstermen, their boats, their habits and their feuds are the real pleasure of the novel.

The author uses the genuineness of this island and its inhabitants to draw Julia’s genuine personality out of its shell. Why was she chosen to survive? Julia was chosen by the author to survive so the reader could spend part of their summer on Sawyer Island.

Kirsten Cappy is a bookseller in Portland.