On the Island Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B007W6RK1M | Format: PDF
On the Island Description
When 30-year-old English teacher Anna Emerson is offered a job tutoring T.J. Callahan at his family's summer rental in the Maldives, she accepts without hesitation; a working vacation on a tropical island trumps the library any day.
T.J. Callahan has no desire to leave town, not that anyone asked him. He's almost 17 and if having cancer wasn't bad enough, now he has to spend his first summer in remission with his family - and a stack of overdue assignments - instead of his friends.
Anna and T.J. are en route to join T.J.'s family in the Maldives when the pilot of their seaplane suffers a fatal heart attack and crash-lands in the Indian Ocean. Adrift in shark-infested waters, their life jackets keep them afloat until they make it to the shore of an uninhabited island. Now Anna and T.J. just want to survive and they must work together to obtain water, food, fire, and shelter.
Their basic needs might be met but as the days turn to weeks, and then months, the castaways encounter plenty of other obstacles, including violent tropical storms, the many dangers lurking in the sea, and the possibility that T.J.'s cancer could return.
As T.J. celebrates yet another birthday on the island, Anna begins to wonder if the biggest challenge of all might be living with a boy who is gradually becoming a man.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 7 hours and 3 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Tracey Garvis Graves
- Audible.com Release Date: April 9, 2012
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B007W6RK1M
I'm ridiculously hard to please when it comes to romance novels. I make no qualms about my quirks. If I hate a book, I will always say so. I don't sugarcoat. I usually raise eyebrows at books with overwhelmingly 5 star reviews. I figure this is the author paying people to shill and/or friends of the authors. Basically deceptive and fake reviews. There's so much of this going on so it's not uncommon to think of.
But I got the sample and something about it hooked me good so I bought it, read it and FELL IN LOVE with it.
5 stars is a rarity for me. When I 5 star something, trust me that you can take it to the bank. I found this book on the romance forum as a recommendation for older heroine/younger hero. The age gap made me balk for a minute but after reading the sample I couldn't resist the pull of this book.
There wasn't ONE THING I disliked in this book. Not a single thing. It was all around, 100%, grade A PERFECTION.
The hero is perfect. The heroine is perfect. They are human and flawed and make mistakes but when I say they're perfect, I mean that I really LOVED them as characters, as people. It's rare to read a character that's genuinely good. Inherently good with nothing to dislike about them.
I don't even need to give a summary of this book because the written summary already tells exactly what it's about and I don't want to spoil this goodness. It's long but it's so perfect. The characters are fleshed out, their time on the island is fully developed and you truly get to know T.J. and Anna. After a few pages, it almost stops being a book and becomes a movie. The author was meticulous descriptive and it was as if you could literally SEE them on this island. SEE what they were doing and it was wonderful.
While they were On The Island it was a fascinating story. The two of them trying to figure out how to live on the island and then actually creating a life for themselves there, that was great. It was hard to put the book down!
It was when they got off the island that the book started to disintegrate. Either the author was rushed to make a deadline or she switched places with someone else because the parts after the island are pretty bad.
There's a very, very deep story going on here. The couple whose relationship seemed so right on the island are thrown into the "real world" where not everybody agrees with it and they need to, once again, adapt to a new way of life and figure out if they still choose to be together even when they were no longer each others' only option. This part of the book (practically the whole 2nd half) should have been just as captivating as the first part. But the writer doesn't go deep with it. She stays on the surface and has the characters tell instead of show. There's so much wasted space and amateurish writing in the post-island part of the book that I found myself skipping entire pages just to get it over with. There was a lot of useless information on those pages. For example, Anna goes to the grocery store and the author tells us every single item that's in the grocery cart. For what reason? The groceries had nothing to do with the plot.
Another thing that bugged me throughout the entire book was the way the characters kept calling each other by name. People don't do that in real life. I'm surprised that none of the beta-readers picked up on it.
The story is also very long. All of the reviewers who are saying they read it in one sitting should probably get checked for blood clots!
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