On the Island

This book seemed to always be in and around Amazon Kindle's top sellers with a good price tag so I thought I'd give it a go. The story starts quite swiftly with Anna jetting off to spend the summer as the tutor for T.J. a rich young teenager recovering from cancer.

On route to their summer home the seaplane they are travelling in crashes and they find themselves stranded on a deserted island.At this point in the book things got a little ‘rose tinted' for my liking as they find themselves somehow surviving (in my opinion at points a little too easily).

The book has a tendency to flip through large periods of time quite quickly and in relatively few chapters they've been on the island months, then years and suddenly T.J is not a boy anymore but a young man of 19 and the reliance that he and Anna have on each other for life, sanity and survival leads to love.

Although parts of the book were a little bit idealistic in my view it didn'tdetract from the authors excellent building of the relationship between Anna and T.J and how in extreme circumstances we often find ourselves drawn to people we otherwise wouldn not have loved and how this can change our lives forever,

The writing was pretty bad. It felt like I was seeing everything from the perspective of a prepubescent teenager's diary. Anna was an immature, shallow and boring nimwit. It was so hard to picture her as a 30-something woman. TJ might have looked like a man but he acted and sounded like a 15 year-old which made their relationship quite unsavoury. The survivalist plot was laughable. I can't even begin to describe just how ridiculous this part was. Everything was so convenient that it totally annihilated any sense of suspense and plausibility. There was no character development. No spark between the characters. Just mindless small talk and incessant descriptions about their daily routine. And just when I thought it can't get any worse, they were rescued and the plot got even more ridiculous. This wasn't a cute, adorable beach read, this was plainly moronic.

Imagine “Blue Lagoon” if Brooke Shields' character had been a 30 year old teacher but Christopher Atkins was still Christopher Atkins. Guilty pleasure-reading fun and surprisingly good story of survival if you can suspend disbelief at various points. When the narrative returns to civilization a lot of the energy leeches out, but the plot has a few surprises kept me engaged. All in all a much better read than I expected.