Review: "Follow the Water" by Ellen Cochrane

Follow the Water by Ellen Cochrane
Published March 2026 via Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
★★★

In 1971, Juliane Koepcke and her mother got on a plane to return to their home in the Peruvian rainforest. Midway through the flight, the plane was struck with lightning and crashed, killing 91 of the 92 people on board. Koepcke was the sole survivor—but her tale didn't end there, because it rapidly became clear that she would need to rescue herself.

I've had Koepcke's own memoir peripherally on my radar for some time, though it hasn't made it onto my reading list just yet. When this middle-grade retelling of the story popped up, though, I was curious. (Plus, the cover's great, isn't it? Quite striking.) And Cochrane does a good job of making the story accessible to younger readers: lots of detail, explanations of why certain things were dangerous (or, paradoxically, why things readers might expect to be dangerous were relatively low threats), sidebars saying more about various details (certain jungle creatures, etc.).

The writing did read as a little flat to me, I think because the author is writing about a person she's (presumably) never met, and there's a limit to how much you do with a nonfiction story when the bulk of the story is about one person, alone, with no dialogue to recount. (I'll be curious to see what the story looks like from Koepcke's perspective!) There is, though, a level of detail that you simply can't glean from a Wikipedia article; for example, I didn't know that Koepcke was so well versed in jungle life, which was probably the difference—other than the sheer chance of how she landed and what her injuries were—between life and death. Werner Herzog eventually made a documentary about the crash (and Koepcke's survival), which I'm now curious about too, though the description of crash remnants still hanging from the trees all those years later is downright eerie. Really tells you something about just how remote the location of the crash was, that everything remained in situ.

The book goes into some detail about what happened after Koepcke's (self-)rescue, which I appreciated, as too often this sort of story ends on those high triumphant notes, whereas of course for Koepcke this must have been a defining moment that split her life in two—as it was for her father, who lost his wife, and as it was for the others who lost loved ones. (And the cruelty of some of the media, my gosh—blaming Koepcke for not rescuing others who survived the initial fall, when even if she'd known where in the jungle they were, she could barely rescue herself! And she a literal child at the time!)

Recommended for middle-grade readers, but adults might do best with something written for an older audience.