Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

In June 2018, twelve members of the Moo Pa, or Wild Boar, soccer team and their young assistant coach bicycled after practice to the cave near their home in Thailand for a few hours of exploration. Unable to hear the rainstorm that developed outside, they were soon trapped by rising water that leaked through the porous limestone ceiling. First local, then national, and then international rescue workers—from highly skilled cave divers and Thai SEALs, to volunteer cooks and even launderers—thronged to the cave to support a rescue mission, or at worst, to bring out thirteen bodies. First, though, order had to be imposed on the chaos, and under the general direction of U.S. Air Force strategists, a truly international, multi-skilled team coordinated in a ten-day race against time to locate the Wild Boars and brainstorm the most effective way to get them out. Although the successful outcome of this widely covered event is well known, Aronson nonetheless makes each nail-biting day feel immediate, as divers who are barely able to navigate the muddy current themselves have to implement a plan to bring weakened children and [End Page 331] teens on an hours-long journey through flooded, rocky, pitch-dark passages. There's more going on here than heroic rescue, though; there's also serious attention paid to the "stateless" status of some of the boys, to Thai attitudes toward government, religion, and privacy that influenced subsequent media coverage, to comparison of the international response to the boys' rescue and of the deadly, nearly concurrent failure of a Laotian dam not far away. Aronson caps his coverage with an essay on his research method and sources; photos and an index are also included. EB