Book Review: On The Island by Tracy Garvis-Graves

A friend recommended this book a couple of weeks back, and I wasn't really intersted. However, when she said the author was married to a Woodward boy, I was intrigued (although I never was able to confirm/deny). I bought the book on my Kindle for $2.99, and set-out for a three-hour tour...

From the cover:
When thirty-year-old English teacher Anna Emerson is offered a job tutoring T.J. Callahan at his family's summer rental in the Maldives, she accepts without hesitation; a working vacation on a tropical island trumps the library any day. T.J. Callahan has no desire to leave town, not that anyone asked him. He's almost seventeen and if having cancer wasn't bad enough, now he has to spend his first summer in remission with his family - and a stack of overdue assignments - instead of his friends. Anna and T.J. are en route to join T.J.'s family in the Maldives when the pilot of their seaplane suffers a fatal heart attack and crash-lands in the Indian Ocean. Adrift in shark-infested waters, their life jackets keep them afloat until they make it to the shore of an uninhabited island. Now Anna and T.J. just want to survive and they must work together to obtain water, food, fire, and shelter. Their basic needs might be met but as the days turn to weeks, and then months, the castaways encounter plenty of other obstacles, including violent tropical storms, the many dangers lurking in the sea, and the possibility that T.J.'s cancer could return. As T.J. celebrates yet another birthday on the island, Anna begins to wonder if the biggest challenge of all might be living with a boy who is gradually becoming a man.

For me, this book was a cross between the movies Castaway and The Blue Lagoon, except the leading lady isn't a teenager - she's a 30 year-old English teacher/tutor for a teenage boy recovering from cancer. I have to admit, the author doesn't waste any time delving into Anna and TJ's story, which is probably what kept me reading. Within the first few pages, the plane crashes and they're instantly in a battle for survival, and the action never ends.

I found myself in a real love/hate relationship with this book. The story was fascinating, fast-paced, and suspenseful...all fabulous qualities in a tale. However - and I don't think I'm really giving anything away here- I really struggled with the physical relationship and intimacy between Anna and TJ, and it made me feel very uncomfortable. The author carefully avoids the relationship until TJ is of "legal" age, but it still just kind of made me feel icky. Probably because I'm a teacher, and I work with kids all day, but I just had a hard time seeing past TJ being her "student," which grossed me out.

Despite all this discomfort, I couldn't put the book down. I devoured the book in less than three days, completely absorbed with the story and where it would go. There were some aspects of the book that I found far-fetched (a boy recovering from cancer can survive for years on a deserted island with no medical assistance?), but I simply couldn't stop reading until I reached the story's end. I completely expected it to be a typical couple-on-the-deserted-island tale, predictable and overused, but the author threw-in some pretty unexpected curveballs that kept me turning the pages.

I wouldn't recommend this book for my teacher friends - except maybe just to open a voracious debate on ethics - but I would totally share it with the hopeless romantics out there!!