Member Review
Review by
Jan B, Reviewer
What a fun read!
Maddy had an overprotective upbringing and the untimely deaths of her parents have left her reeling. She needs a change and signs up for a reality Survivor-type show where 8 contestants (four men, four women) are left on an island off the coast of Scotland, where they will live for one year. It’s an experiment to see how they will survive, and no one is voted off. But alliances are soon drawn, and Maddy, having few social skills, becomes the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong. If you wonder what would happen if society breaks down and it's survival of the fittest, this is a prime example of mob mentality.
The book opens with Maddy sitting for an interview for a tv show. She’s painfully thin and bedraggled, after unspecified criminal charges and time in prison. Things obviously have gone terribly awry, and not everyone made it back from the island. Maddy tells her story, and what a story it is!
Please note I hate camping or rustic anything. My idea of roughing it is making reservations at a luxury resort where I will just have to make do without my Tempur-pedic mattress. But, still, I loved the setting and the descriptions of how the group uses their skills to forage and provide shelter and food for themselves. The second half of the book was riveting and unputdownable, and the ending...well, I needed to talk about it!
As an aside, you do not have to be a fan of camping or roughing it in order to enjoy this book. My husband and I were huge fans of the show Survivor in its early days, and he would always joke (not really joking...) that had I been on the show I'd be the first voted off the island. My fellow survivors would hate me and couldn’t get rid of me fast enough.
However, I do like living vicariously, and there was the Survivor nostalgic factor. Plus, this story was unique, which I appreciate. So many books are a variation of the same theme but this was different and I will likely remember it for that alone.
At the 50% mark, winter is setting in and conditions deteriorate rapidly after a surprising discovery. The tension ramps up, and I simply could not put the book down. I was glued to the page to find out what would happen and who would survive. I was at 95% at the end of a very long car trip where I would ordinarily be ready to get out of the car, but I found myself urging my husband to run an errand so I could finish the book. He wasn't buying it. It’s been a long time since a book has affected me this way.
Is it perfect? No. Told in the 1st person POV, we only hear Maddy’s story with no input from the others. It left me wondering why she was ostracized and if she was an unreliable narrator. But that also works in the plus column because it left me as a reader uncertain. Secondly, foreshadowing annoys me, and there was too much “if only I’d known how much worse it would get…”. To be fair, it DID get much, much worse, but I didn’t need to hear it repeatedly. So, this isn’t a book for book clubs! Just read it, accept it as a purely entertaining read, and move on.
Maddy had an overprotective upbringing and the untimely deaths of her parents have left her reeling. She needs a change and signs up for a reality Survivor-type show where 8 contestants (four men, four women) are left on an island off the coast of Scotland, where they will live for one year. It’s an experiment to see how they will survive, and no one is voted off. But alliances are soon drawn, and Maddy, having few social skills, becomes the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong. If you wonder what would happen if society breaks down and it's survival of the fittest, this is a prime example of mob mentality.
The book opens with Maddy sitting for an interview for a tv show. She’s painfully thin and bedraggled, after unspecified criminal charges and time in prison. Things obviously have gone terribly awry, and not everyone made it back from the island. Maddy tells her story, and what a story it is!
Please note I hate camping or rustic anything. My idea of roughing it is making reservations at a luxury resort where I will just have to make do without my Tempur-pedic mattress. But, still, I loved the setting and the descriptions of how the group uses their skills to forage and provide shelter and food for themselves. The second half of the book was riveting and unputdownable, and the ending...well, I needed to talk about it!
As an aside, you do not have to be a fan of camping or roughing it in order to enjoy this book. My husband and I were huge fans of the show Survivor in its early days, and he would always joke (not really joking...) that had I been on the show I'd be the first voted off the island. My fellow survivors would hate me and couldn’t get rid of me fast enough.
However, I do like living vicariously, and there was the Survivor nostalgic factor. Plus, this story was unique, which I appreciate. So many books are a variation of the same theme but this was different and I will likely remember it for that alone.
At the 50% mark, winter is setting in and conditions deteriorate rapidly after a surprising discovery. The tension ramps up, and I simply could not put the book down. I was glued to the page to find out what would happen and who would survive. I was at 95% at the end of a very long car trip where I would ordinarily be ready to get out of the car, but I found myself urging my husband to run an errand so I could finish the book. He wasn't buying it. It’s been a long time since a book has affected me this way.
Is it perfect? No. Told in the 1st person POV, we only hear Maddy’s story with no input from the others. It left me wondering why she was ostracized and if she was an unreliable narrator. But that also works in the plus column because it left me as a reader uncertain. Secondly, foreshadowing annoys me, and there was too much “if only I’d known how much worse it would get…”. To be fair, it DID get much, much worse, but I didn’t need to hear it repeatedly. So, this isn’t a book for book clubs! Just read it, accept it as a purely entertaining read, and move on.
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