A great beach book. Part love story, part survivor story and just plain good. Claire, a breast cancer survivor recovers on Chappaquiddick Island on Martha's Vinyard where she strikes up an unusual friendship and layer romance with the local hermit. His story slowly unfolds over a series if delicious and sumptuous meals they cook for one another. All is wonderful until Claire accidentally stumbles on the Hermit's story. The narrative is wonderfully detailed and you get a real sense of life on that island ESP off-season. The end may be a bit smaltzy but there's nothing wrong with that once in awhile. If you like a good love story with plenty of local color and great culinary descriptions do read this one. I wanted to like this book so much more than I actually did. There are enough detailed reviews of the plot that I won't do it again here, I'll just summarize my main issues:- The author really has an awkward narrative style. It jumps from essentially lecturing about historical facts to a paragraph about the book's protagonists, and back to history again. This could happen for half a dozen paragraphs -- back and forth, with seemingly no correlation between the two. Eventually it would become clear why he chose this particular spot to insert this historical background but the manner of introducing was so heavy-handed, and the sheer volume of content was overkill. If I wanted to read a biography of Reich I would. Here, I wanted to read a relationship novel.- The details of Chappaquiddick Island were nice and displayed the author's obvious familiarity with the place, which I suppose was the intent. But honestly, other than a passing mention there was no reason to go into repeated detail of the Ted Kennedy accident. It was really just filler, and had nothing to do with the book at all. It was like a weird kind of name-dropping, for lack of a better way to describe it.- Other than Claire and the Hermit, NONE of the characters were fleshed-out. The way they were described was so one-note -- Claire's daughter was a rebel, and such a stereotypical one at that; the Reich author was an eccentric; the ex-husband was a philanderer. There was absolutely nothing unexpected about these characters and worse, they had no depth. Really when you get down to it, even Claire and the Hermit were very lightly drawn. Claire battled cancer but we really never saw how she struggled, what she feared, how she hurt. The Hermit was isolated but we never felt his pain, saw his thoughts, understood his seclusion. As many reviewers have noted, the descriptions of food in this book are incredibly detailed. I wish that the same attention had been paid to the characters.- It honestly just drove me nuts that the Hermit was called that throughout the whole book. I really wanted to at least give this an "I Liked It", but the ending (which I see some previous reviewers have spoiled) stripped away any chance of that. I don't need all my endings to be happy but I do need some kind of an emotional payoff, and I personally didn't get it.
What do You think about Island Apart (2012)?
Not normally the type of book I read, Island Apart was actually engaging and am easy read.
—jj101
I loved this book. Twisting plot,complicated characters...great story.
—Ruberjig
Isolation, love and cooking. Highly recommended by Arlene.
—mayra
