Title: On the Island
Publisher: Create Space
Pub Date: 3/14/2012
Author: Tracy Garvis-Graves
Received From: Purchased
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.
On the Island is a full-length adult romance novel. It explores the human need for more than mere survival, the meaning of bonds formed in isolation, and the ways those bonds are bound to change.
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.
On the Island is a full-length adult romance novel. It explores the human need for more than mere survival, the meaning of bonds formed in isolation, and the ways those bonds are bound to change.
Anna is a woman I could relate with immediately, She was at a crossroads in her life and felt like a change was in order so she took on a job tutoring a teenage boy in paradise, only paradise didn't quite turn out right. Life became strained for Anna and T.J. in a matter of days from their meeting. The challenge was survival not romantic at all. They met this challenge head on learning how to survive, co-exist, and care for one another in a non-romantic way. Years lapse on the island and Anna and T.J. are still on the island, still in a platonic relationship. Some might say there is no way to easily enter into more and I might often agree, expecting them to give into passion in a cliche way soon after being stranded. But this author wrote the story well and I never felt like anything was wrong, instead I was pulling for the relationship before it began.
I don't want to give away to much here but I will say that reading this won't disappoint you
This book was incredible. I literally read it in one day; I could not put it down. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants an interesting, attention grabbing, carefree read. It is the perfect book to take you to the beach, you feel like you know the characters first hand and you feel as if you are experiencing the same things that they are.
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