The Island

[alobear]

I picked up The Island by Victoria Hislop in a charity shop haul, since it seemed designed pretty much exactly to appeal to me. There's a subgenre of contemporary fiction that involves a young woman travelling somewhere or discovering something (letters, for example) that allows her to find out things she didn't already know about the history of her family. These books usually follow two timelines - the present day of whenever the book was written, with the protagonist exploring her history and learning things about herself and her own life along the way - and the past narrative of whichever predecessor she is finding out about.

I've read quite a few of these now and generally liked them. Unfortunately, that wasn't really true of this one. The opening was okay, with Alexis contemplating the state of her relationship with her boyfriend and deciding to find out more about where her mother grew up, though Alexis herself wasn't overly engaging. And the start of the historical narrative on the island of Spinalonga (which I very vividly remember visiting myself during a family holiday to Crete in the early 1990s) was interesting. But the historical narrative was more summary than it was proper direct action. And the story as it unfolded was quite dreary.

Also, I was expecting the narrative to switch back and forth between the historical story and the present day with Alexis. But we only got less than 40 pages with Alexis at the start, then over 400 pages of the historical narrative, and only a very few pages back with Alexis at the end, which wasn't very satisfying.

Ah well, you can't win 'em all!