She's Gonna Blow: Boiling Point

Well, it turns out that in the normal course of events I don't read much South American fiction.  So I had to go out looking to have any hope of finishing my Global challenge.  It's surprisingly hard to find fiction books by continent; nonfiction is easy enough but turns out I foolishly signed up for a challenge that wants novels.  I may cheat a bit.

Anyway, poking around in the online catalog brought me to Boiling Point by Karen Dionne about a bunch of earnestly idiotic environmentalists who rush to an erupting volcano in Chile.  The volcano, Chaiten, is real and did erupt in 2008, with just enough warning to allow the nearby villagers to flee without any belongings, but all the scientific tourists in the book are invented.

It says bad things about me, but the high body count really endeared the book to me.  In the middle I was staring at some of the characters thinking "you are just too stupid to live" and it turns out that the author agreed with me!  They don't get away with their foolish decisions.  Which makes things a lot more fair, really.  The book also lays out some environmental questions and some thoughts on personal responsibility, but the focus is on the danger from the lava and the sulphur and the VOLCANO.