Unfortunately this was a DNF for me. It is not my usual genre of novels and I just couldn't see to get into this one. Please do give this one a try though as there are many great reviews, it just was not for me.

2.5/5 Stars

Jude returns to her family cottage on Gull Island to try and uncover memories of her past, along with her father's will after he has mysteriously disappeared.

This book was SLOW and felt like it dragged on forever for such a small book. I did enjoy that the narrator was unreliable, as that is one of my favourite tropes, but even then I was bored the majority of my time reading. All of the characters in this book were unlikable, making it hard to connect with them. I also found the writing to be choppy and a bit repetitive, which became tiresome after awhile. I switched to the audiobook, and I do think that helped with the enjoyment of the story overall.

I almost DNF’d this book at 25% but thought I’d give it a chance. Sad to say, it didn’t improve until the end. The story was bleak and gloomy and it was a difficult read for me. I mostly skimmed it and I kept on falling asleep, which was highly unusual for me as I love psychological thrillers. After finishing it, I wished I’d DNFd it. This story was just not for me.😔

I did not finish this one, it was not for me, I couldn't relate to the characters, and just did not care for the story.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster Canada and Netgalley for the digital arc of this book.

When I first started Gull Island I was pleasantly surprised to see that it took place on an island in Georgian Bay that was accessible by boat from Honey Harbour. Growing up my grandparents had a cottage just past Honey Harbour on old highway 69 (now the 400) so I was able to picture the setting perfectly in my mind. As I continued with reading Gull Island I soon realized that I was dealing with an unreliable narrator and a twisted story of a terrible family filled with terrible people. This book left me on edge and with bad dreams when I wasn't reading it. It is quite that psychological thriller that will leave you wondering what just happened.

A personification of the ghosts who haunt us throughout life.
​
How did the book make me feel/think?

I don’t know who my father is — but I do know I’m 48% Norwegian. I watched my father die twice, once literally and once metaphorically.

“Gull Island” resonated with me as a representation of the unresolved questions and emotional ghosts that can haunt us when we lack critical pieces of our personal history and identity. This kind of uncertainty indeed leaves many of us feeling adrift and disconnected from ourselves, like we’re wandering alone in a fog.

When everything we hold dear seems to slip away or becomes lost in the darkness, it can be an incredibly challenging experience. The feeling of being crushed by the walls of discovery can be overwhelming, and it’s natural to seek coping mechanisms like alcohol to numb the pain.

“Gull Island” is about surviving and finding a way to get back up regardless of how daunting the journey in front of us appears to be and what creatures lurk in the dark.

As the pages turn and the darkness begins to recede, readers become emotionally invested in the protagonist’s (Jude) quest for answers and self-discovery. They share Jude’s hopes, fears, and triumphs, and they will find them cheering for her as she navigates the twists and turns of her journey.

That’s how “Gull Island” made me feel.

WRITTEN: 9 September 2023

Gull Island is Anna Porter's new novel.
Jude's father has not been seen in almost a month. Him disappearing is not unusual, but Jude's mother wants her to look anyway. One of the last places left to look is Gull Island, a private island and home to the family cottages. It's early in the season still with snow still on the ground. She doesn't think he'll be there, but her mother has also asked her to look for some documents.

The lead characters is of course Jude. Everything we see and hear is from her view and perceptions. With every new picture she finds or a treasure found from her younger days, memories of her childhood are remembered and inspected.

Is what she remembers the truth? Has she covered up the ugliness and hidden it away all these years? As a reader, can I believe what she is saying and seeing? Why? Well, Jude is a (very) unreliable narrator, for a number of reasons. She's a raging alcoholic for one. But what about the noises she's hearing? This uncertainty kept me turning pages to the final chapter. I had to know what the truth was. Porter teases the reader, dropping foreshadowing many times and alluding to what happened in the past.

"My dreams were leeching into my consciousness, making it hard to know what was real. That's all. I had to focus."

Porter has given us a detailed setting for the novel. I was able to easily build the island in my mind.

Gull Island is a slow burning read, one that takes the reader through a disturbing exploration of a dysfunctional family.

I wanted so badly to love this but I think it just wasn’t for me.

The writing is lovely but I was honestly really bored. I almost DNF’d this 115 in pages in because it really felt like nothing was happening.

I will say the author is great at writing an eerie atmosphere and there was sort of a weird dread in the pit of my stomach while reading.

2/5 stars.

This book was unfortunately not for me.
I was expecting lots of twists and turns. Having finnished the book I still don't really know what the point was.
I found it hard to get through, had it not been an ARC I would not have finnished.
I loved the cover, plus side!

Thank you netgalley and simon & schuster for the ARC in exhange for an honest review.

This book was very slow for me. I had a hard time picking it up. I’m sorry it just was not for me. I do hope other enjoy it more than I did.

DNF at 20%

I love a psychological thriller but at 20 % in there is nothing thrilling and no plot in sight. The writing is disjointed and I haven’t been able to find any correlation from sentence to sentence let alone each chapter to make any sense of what is happening.

There are clearly many characters in the family but none of them have been provided with enough background to follow their stories or relevance.

Unfortunately, I just can’t make myself continue on.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this book for an honest review.

Gull Island by Anna Porter is a mildly-suspenseful thriller about family history (and present) and includes what one would hope for in a thriller including a storm, dreams, a will, photos and a level of ghostly creepiness.

Jude goes to her family cottage on isolated Gull Island to discover more about her her estranged father's disappearance and will. Animals, darkness and solitude give her the heebie jeebies. She uses alcohol to numb her problems and fears. She digs and discovers far more than she had ever imagined. Her mother and sister are involved, too, and drama ensues.

Secluded island settings always captivate me; it's what I liked about this story. But the level of suspense and cohesion are unfortunately lacking. For some reason the writing didn't connect with me and didn't engage my interest. Alcoholic juvenile main characters are not my wheelhouse. The blurb sounded promising but I was unfortunately left befuddled and disappointed.

My sincere thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for providing me with a digital copy of this novel.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster Canada for my copy of Gull Island.

I regret spending time on reading a portion of this book. A few chapters in I already know that this would not work for me. The sentence construction, story flow, characterization, - it wasn't for me. I was hoping for an atmospheric and creepy thriller but I did not get that.

Sorry, it's a no for me.

[arc review]
Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster Canada for providing an arc in exchange for an honest review.
Gull Island releases September 5, 2023

I fully regret spending my time on this title.

Straight away, I noticed that the writing style was very different with a lot of short and choppy sentences. The fluidity just wasn’t there and it really impeded the reading experience.
Not once did we actually see the fmc interact with anyone else in the present timeline on the secluded island (any and all dialogue is presented as flashback styles). I never realized the exclusion of any active dialogue would bother me so much until I read this.

I was hoping to get something eerie and atmospheric, but the story really fell short.
This read like such a flat trip down memory lane from the perspective of an alcoholic, rather than a gripping mystery about the search for a missing father.

The characterizations were so odd and I felt like I knew more about the main characters sister, Gina, than I did about the main character.

<i>Gull Island</I> suffered from a lot of tell, not show, and it took too long to convey the plot to the reader.
Jade’s motivations as a character (especially tying into the end reveal) made absolutely no sense, and nothing was explained properly.

In my opinion, this just wasn’t a strong psychological thriller, and probably would have fared better with a completely different approach to the writing structure, with more opportunities to be outside of the narrators head.

cw: alcoholic, parent with dementia, unfavourable views towards autistic people

Jude returns to her family’s secluded cottage searching for some answers from her past. Along with her father’s will as he’s disappeared and Jude’s mother has asked her to locate the will.

A nasty storm hits, the power is out and Jude’s only transportation off the island has drifted off.

Will Jude escape? Or will her drinking habit get the best of her?


If this wasn’t an ARC, I would have abandoned this read at the beginning. I had such a hard time with it. The characters weren’t introduced well at the beginning. The author didn’t really explain where the story took place. Had I not been from Ontario, I wouldn’t know where the location was.

I really didn’t understand the plot of the book and I didn’t find it matched the actual story. It went around in circles, repeated the same things.

I was ready for a real, gripping psychological thriller, but this wasn’t it.


Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster Canada for a DRC. Gull Island is available September 5.

LAKESIDE 🛶 book review featuring “Gull Island” by Anna Porter!

BOOK REVIEW: 🖤🖤🖤/5

Jude returns to her family’s remote cottage on Gull Island to search for ANSWERS. Her estranged father has gone missing and her mother has asked her to seek out his will.

Returning to the island and the destitute cottage now feels lonelier then ever … and Jude has flashbacks of the dark times of her childhood. As she looks for her father’s will, she is also looking for proof that at one time she had a happy and loving childhood. But sadly, slices of good times were far and few between 💔

When a terrible storm severs the tie to her boat, Jude is now a prisoner of the island and must come face to face with much more than the long buried secrets of her family. Jude has a drinking problem and this adds to the haunting and unreliable nature of the story. It is hard to decipher what is reality and what is not as she SPIRALS into the nightmares of her troubled family and the island ☠️

Thank you kindly to @simonschusterca @netgalley and Anna Porter for my advanced digital copy in exchange for my honest review! This book releases on September 5, 2023! Always happy to support a Canadian author 🇨🇦

Jude is an author of YA books who finds the answers to all her problems in a bottle. She is the epitome of an unreliable narrator. With her father missing and her mother wanting to make sure she is left everything in the will, Jude travels to the family cabin to see if she can find the documents.

There were parts of this book that were deliciously creepy and twisted. We are also pretty overwhelmed with a large cast of characters that at first we have no idea how they fit together. It does eventually all make sense as Jude wades through her childhood memories and untangles the truth of what has gone on in her recent months, so be patient and let the story unfold.

When a thirty-something woman returns to her family cabin on Gull Island, nestled in massive Georgian Bay, she finds that the memories come speeding back. Not just reminders of good times, as they were seemingly somewhat few, but many memories of troubled family moments, infighting and people keeping secrets from one another. To make matters much, much worse, she’s there seeking important documents and to try to find a hint as to where her wayward, secretive, exotic and very, very rich father has disappeared to.

Such is the premise of Gull Island by Anna Porter. A soon-to-be released psychological thriller about a troubled family and one of its offspring.

The main character and potentially reliable narrator is named Jude. The eldest of two siblings who almost never got along, she’s a very troubled divorcee who still misses her ex-husband at times. Her main issue, though, is that she’s a horrible alcoholic whose addictive illness makes it so that she drinks all day and night, and sometimes forgets how much she’s imbibed. We quickly learn this through reading the book, as Jude talks about going to get a drink from a bottle that is surprisingly empty. As such, we’re always left wondering how reliable our narrator truly is.

All of this book is told from one point-of-view, and it jumps around quite a bit. Jude narrates as she tries her best to get the cabin back into working order, after having not been there for a while. She opines about her family, makes judgements about her sister and often goes back to thinking about her unloving mother, who’s ailing with dementia. In fact, it’s her mother who’s sent her to the cabin to look for her wayward father’s will.

Then, there’s the father, who’s been missing for a little while with no trace whatsoever. He’s one of those people who made lots of money in secret, and doesn’t have a problem with jet-setting to wherever business may call, but it’s unlike him to disappear like this, especially since his young girlfriend has no idea of where he is. It doesn’t help that the father’s rudeness and secret keeping extended to his own family, who didn’t really know him all that well. He’d disappear, illegally hunt animals on the island, and moved into a nearby cabin which he kept locked.

Part character study and part psychological thriller, Gull Island by Anna Porter is a book that caught my interest for two reasons. To start, there was its premise which intrigued me. Then, I realized that its setting was one I somewhat knew. As a child I spent time in Georgian Bay with family, and have good memories of being there. As such, I had to request this one to read about a place I sort of know, get in touch with a former life, and support a fellow Canadian.

Unfortunately, I found that I didn't enjoy this one as much as I had hoped. It was decently written, but jumped around a lot and wasn't exactly easy to read. Furthermore, I found that the story was very repetitive. Our narrator and main character would often go over the same things repeatedly. Lastly, the ending felt abrupt and wasn't great. Nothing about this book truly stood out as being great or unique. That said, it wasn't bad -- it was just alright. I'm glad I read it, enjoyed it for what it was, but wouldn't read it again.

With all that having been covered, there's the possibility that this just wasn't the book for me overall. Perhaps I didn't fit into its target audience as a thirty-something male. I'm going to pass the advanced reader's copy on to my aunt to see if she enjoys it more.

At the end of the day, Gull Island by Anna Porter is just an alright book. If you're familiar with Georgian Bay, or like reading about troubled families that don't exactly like each other then this may be for you. Just be warned that there is some triggering content involving autism. As I hinted before, this is a book about not-so-nice people.

This review is based on a copy of the book we were provided with. Thank you to Simon & Schuster Canada and NetGalley for facilitating our early access. Receiving an early copy did not sway our opinion, nor did receiving it for free.