On the Island by Tracey Garvis Graves

On the Island

by Tracey Garvis Graves

In this runaway New York Times bestseller, a harrowing near-death experience brings together an English teacher and her student as they struggle to survive on a desert island.

Sixteen-year-old T.J. Callahan has no desire to go anywhere. With his cancer in remission, all he wants is to get back to his normal life. But his parents insist that he spend the summer catching up on the school he missed while he was sick.

Anna Emerson is a thirty-year-old English teacher who has been worn down by the cold Chicago winters and a relationship that’s going nowhere. To break up the monotony of everyday life, she jumps at the chance to spend the summer on a tropical island tutoring T.J.

Anna and T.J. board a private plane headed to the Callahans’ summer home, but as they fly over the Maldives’ twelve hundred islands, the unthinkable happens: their plane crashes in shark-infested waters. They make it to shore, but soon discover they’re stranded on an uninhabited island.

At first, their only thought is survival. But as the days turn to weeks, and then months, and as birthdays pass, the castaways must brave violent tropical storms, the many dangers lurking in the sea, and the worst threat of all—the possibility that T.J.’s cancer could return. With only each other for love and support, these two lost souls must come to terms with their situation and find compaionship in one another in the moments they need it most.

Reviewed by Leah on

5 of 5 stars

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When I first heard of On The Island, I wasn’t 100% sure it was my kind of book. Sure, the premise sounded awesome (like a modern Castaway without Tom Hanks), but I just couldn’t see past the fact a 30-year-old teacher was potentially going to fall in love with a 16-year-old cancer survivor. I mean, come on! When it’s out like that it IS strange, and weird, and off-putting. However, all of my fears disappeared immediately as soon as I read the first page. A book can be made or broken by its first page, and On The Island was made. It was epic. It was so good I read it in a day and will still be thinking about it in a few weeks. It’s the kind of book you can get lost in, the kind of book where you literally feel everything the characters are feeling.

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.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 8 July, 2012: Finished reading
  • 8 July, 2012: Reviewed