Leah
Written on Jul 8, 2012
On The Island is truly one of my favourite reads this year, perhaps ever. It’s like a book version of Lost, a modern version of Castaway, as Anna and T.J. find themselves stranded on an island somewhere in the Maldives and have to fight for survival. It’s been a little while since a book has blown me away, and I was starting to wonder if my love of Chick Lit was perhaps waning but On The Island brought it back with a bang. There’s something about novels like On The Island that do, truly, make you fall in love. The struggles Anna and T.J. face, can you imagine having to live for years on an island with nobody knowing you’re there? Having to hunt your own food, build your own shelter, and wonder if you will ever escape?But the way in which Anna and T.J. deal with it is just amazing. Totally amazing.
You become so involved in Anna and T.J.s lives that it doesn’t matter that Anna is thirty-something and T.J. still a teenager. It’s not that the island makes it somehow irrelevent, it’s just that they both just fit each other somehow. Anna isn’t ancient and T.J. is one of the most mature teenagers you’ll ever read about. I quite literally couldn’t put the book down, because I was just so desperate to know if Anna and T.J. would survive, if they would be found, or if they would forever be left on the island. I loved how they just made it work for them. It sounds nuts. Living on an island, building a house, just being, despite no real food or anything but it worked. Anna and T.J. made it work and they made it work effortlessly. How they both grow and change and develop as the novel skips along at quite a pace is both exhausting but utterly readable. You are always skipping to the next page to see what could possibly happen next.
On The Island is an absolute gem. I applaud Penguin for bringing it into my world, I thank Tracey for writing such a readable, exciting novel, a novel that I was so sad to finish because I found it so difficult to leave Anna and T.J. It’s the first novel in so, so long that has gotten me excited. I hear there’s the possibility of a film and I can’t WAIT. I just know it will be great, considering the book it will be adapted from. The book is a work of art. I regret my initial feelings on the book. It’s not a novel about a 30-something cradle-robbing a teenager, it’s so much more than that. So much more that the age thing just isn’t an issue. Not really. Read it and you will see what I mean, but be warned, as the cover of my proof copy says, you WILL fall in love with this book.
