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3.32 AVERAGE
3.32 AVERAGE
emotional
informative
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
*Audio version
Generous 3 stars, mainly for the quality of prose and the interesting premise. Also I always enjoy a PNW setting and Smith’s description of the natural beauty of the islands is fantastic.
Otherwise this story fell very short of its potential. The eco warrior cult thing could have been way more developed. What they are attempting on the island is really interesting but it doesn’t really come together.
Unfortunately the plot was very disjointed. The ‘mystery’ was just sprinkled in with no real support to the storyline. There were too many players with not enough to link them together in a way that made you care, or understand, what seemed to be deep relationships. Lucie and Kate needed more background especially. There wasn’t enough ‘there’ there about a lot of plot points.
Although I don’t mind time jumping, this story would have been way better with a simple forward timeline. And I agree with many that I could have done without that ending (maybe it had more symbolism that I didn’t get).
This review seems more negative than I felt while reading. I think I am just really annoyed that at the end I am disappointed in a story i could have loved.
I think I need a break from Island stories for a bit.
*Narration was superb. Emily Rankin is one of the best.
Generous 3 stars, mainly for the quality of prose and the interesting premise. Also I always enjoy a PNW setting and Smith’s description of the natural beauty of the islands is fantastic.
Otherwise this story fell very short of its potential. The eco warrior cult thing could have been way more developed. What they are attempting on the island is really interesting but it doesn’t really come together.
Unfortunately the plot was very disjointed. The ‘mystery’ was just sprinkled in with no real support to the storyline. There were too many players with not enough to link them together in a way that made you care, or understand, what seemed to be deep relationships. Lucie and Kate needed more background especially. There wasn’t enough ‘there’ there about a lot of plot points.
Although I don’t mind time jumping, this story would have been way better with a simple forward timeline. And I agree with many that I could have done without that ending (maybe it had more symbolism that I didn’t get).
This review seems more negative than I felt while reading. I think I am just really annoyed that at the end I am disappointed in a story i could have loved.
I think I need a break from Island stories for a bit.
*Narration was superb. Emily Rankin is one of the best.
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
What a f***ing awful ending to a book I was very excited about
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
dark
emotional
sad
(3.5) I've been meaning to read this for a while. I've met Ms. Smith a few times before, and her book "Glaciers" is still one of my favorite books. Unlike "Glaciers," which is a quiet and introspective meditation on a single day in a life, "Marrow Island" is a quasi-thriller mystery set on an island reminiscent of the San Juans in Washington, where a mysterious "colony" is working to recover an island destroyed by an earthquake. It's a quick read (I finished it in one day), and the subject matter is unique and compelling. It's part eco-thriller, part personal reflection. I felt that it could have benefitted from a bit more background - I would have liked to know more about the relationship between Lucie and Kate. But overall I liked the book, and I am very much a fan of this author's intimate and lyrical writing.
An interesting but low key book. It's not a thriller by an means even though there's a death in it. The setting is: there was an earthquake in the Pacific Northwest in 1993, a refinery on a small island was destroyed by a resulting fire. The island and surrounding area was polluted due to the chemicals from the refinery and from fighting the fire.
The protagonist's (Lucie) father died in the fire. We are confusingly shown two time lines, one in 2014 and one in 2016. I didn't think it added to the story and only made it harder to follow. The earlier timeline shows Lucie going back to the island and finding back to Earth colonists there. The current timeline shows Lucie settling back in her family's old home on a neighboring island.
I read to the end to find out if there was a whodunit about the death but it was explained in a paragraph. The only interesting part about the book was learning about using mushrooms to detoxify land after pollution. I would have liked the book a lot more had there only been one timeline.
I got this book free as a review copy.
The protagonist's (Lucie) father died in the fire. We are confusingly shown two time lines, one in 2014 and one in 2016. I didn't think it added to the story and only made it harder to follow. The earlier timeline shows Lucie going back to the island and finding back to Earth colonists there. The current timeline shows Lucie settling back in her family's old home on a neighboring island.
I read to the end to find out if there was a whodunit about the death but it was explained in a paragraph. The only interesting part about the book was learning about using mushrooms to detoxify land after pollution. I would have liked the book a lot more had there only been one timeline.
I got this book free as a review copy.
Lucie is a protagonist with no agency; every event of the story just happens to her and she never expresses any strong feelings one way or the other. The story itself is too disjointed to be interesting ; it takes way too long to reconcile the present to two years prior with the annoying alternating chapters. The basic idea of an isolated community/cult trying to rebuild is unique, but overall this story is so bland as to be entirely forgettable.
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Loved this until the end. I'm generally okay with unresolved or ambiguous endings, but this one just didn't work. If I'd listened to this as an audiobook, I would have been sure I was missing tracks. In fact, this ending is so crushing it drops 2 stars for me. I'm pretty sure the longer I think about it, the angrier I'm going to get about it!
This book is perfect if you are a PNW native or afficionado: it's set in Seattle, the San Juans, and other parts of Washington State, twenty years post-big one, as in, the really BIG one, that is supposedly destined to hit the Emerald City. Ms. Smith's other novel, Glaciers, is one of my favorite quiet reads of all time, and I had high expectations for Marrow Island. Perhaps that was why, in spite of the eloquent lovely prose and likeable characters, it read a little too slowly, even for me. Having said that, if your fans of Station Eleven are wanting more realistic post-fill-in-the-blank-disaster-pandemic-apocalypse fiction, they will find much to appreciate in MI: a lifelong love-friendship examined, a natural disaster paired with a man-made result, and a quiet calmness juxtaposed with chaos. Grades 10+