Mini-review: The Island

Author: Elin Hilderbrand
Format: audio: approx 11 hours
Characters: Chess, Tate, Birdie, India
Subject: Women's woes
Setting: Tuckernuck Island off the coast of Nantucket
Series:  I hope not!
Genre: Chick lit fiction
Source: Audio book from Hachette Audio group received in exchange for running blog contest and providing a review.



Drivel, drivel, drivel, the kind of writing that gives chick lit its oft deserved bad name. Cardboard characters trying to convince themselves and the reader that their oh so predictable problems are interesting to anyone else.  Four women ( a mother, her 2 daughters, and her sister) go to an island to lick their wounds, do some female bonding(???) and expect to emerge whole after one month.  A  predictable (and boring) plot read by a whiny-voiced audio narrator who tried hard to make this more interesting than it was. The setting is totally unrealistic -- like how many rich women today will willingly spend $100K to build a fake floating island in a pond in their back yard for a wedding, but then be equally willing to go off to spend 30 days with no hot water, an icebox (not a refrig but an ICEBOX!!) only one toilet, no phone, no internet, no tv, no way off the island but a hired boat, no cell phone coverage, nothing-nada-zip-zilch.  And we're supposed to believe this is romantic??? The pretty "everyone lives happily ever after" package she ties up with a bow in the epilogue is particularly annoying and overdone.  The story would have been much stronger had it been omitted.

I know the author states in the end that Tuckernuck Island is a real place.  I simply hope that the residents of this privately owned abode of the wealthy have more oomph in their lives than this group of really annoying women.  I found this one had less substance than her other book "The Castaways" which I read earlier this summer. The only reason I finished listening to this one was because the Hachette Audio group provided it to me in exchange for my running a contest earlier here on my blog and providing a review. 

Sorry Hachette, this one is drudgingly boring. Other than that I don't feel strongly about it.  It's pure overrated drivel.