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A review by awyl
The Island by M.A. Bennett
1.0
actual rating: 1.5/5
the island: a story of a geek stranded on an island with his persecutors, how he reverses their social statuses and it’s effect.
how do i describe this? i originally chose this book because i wanted something to read on holiday and i’d heard that the author’s other book STAGS was well written. because of that i naturally had pretty decent standards set for this book, and i was unfortunately quite disappointed.
the story was very slow for such a small book. we don’t even reach the island until around the 100 page mark. up until that point, all we find out is how bad our main character Link feels his life is because he’s a geek and a slow runner. we don’t see him do anything other than accept it.
the narrative was purposely geeky and from an outsider’s point of view, and the narrator purposely dislikeable, but i thought it was too overdone. instead of merely disliking link, i just felt very, very uncomfortable. there were passages i couldn’t help but squirm through: some were COMPLETELY wrong and others were just plain embarrassing.
take this little excerpt for example. i don’t know if it’s because i am around the characters’ ages or something else but reading this made me feel awkward – it read as if the main character was a parent trying too hard to be cool.
“Turk thought he was a real Roadman, and he was lucky in his second name because it fitted that image perfectly. Turk had this dumb haircut which was almost shaved up the sides and long on top. He probably thought it gave him edge. He wore this Adidas pouch on a long strap strung across his body, presumably to hold all his 'drugs’. He also made that really annoying noise with his mouth, that one called kissing your teeth, a sucking little 'street' noise which punctuated everything he said.”
on the island, Link becomes rapidly more and more dislikable whilst his bitter and reprehensible actions start to come through. he makes girls dress up in a skirt and do things for him, punishing them with starvation if they didn’t do what he wanted and that made me sick. he thinks that he’s entitled to do all of this because of how he was bullied in school.
whilst the characters were the most built up out of everything in the whole book, they were very cliched and were your typical high school stereotypes. i feel like the author tried to be quirky with an overused trope but it really didn’t work. as this was a very character-based story, nothing else was as well-developed or explored as i’d hoped. there were so many opportunities that they author could have taken about more aspects of the actual island.
every ‘twist’ in the story could have been seen a mile off so i wasn’t surprised when any of them occurred, which was a shame because i’d heard that there were many twists in STAGS. if they were anything like the twists in the island i doubt i’m going to enjoy the novel.
the epilogue of this book made me lose all hope of this book having any redeeming qualities. it was just so far-fetched and seemingly unlikely that it was very unbelievable.
the island: a story of a geek stranded on an island with his persecutors, how he reverses their social statuses and it’s effect.
how do i describe this? i originally chose this book because i wanted something to read on holiday and i’d heard that the author’s other book STAGS was well written. because of that i naturally had pretty decent standards set for this book, and i was unfortunately quite disappointed.
the story was very slow for such a small book. we don’t even reach the island until around the 100 page mark. up until that point, all we find out is how bad our main character Link feels his life is because he’s a geek and a slow runner. we don’t see him do anything other than accept it.
the narrative was purposely geeky and from an outsider’s point of view, and the narrator purposely dislikeable, but i thought it was too overdone. instead of merely disliking link, i just felt very, very uncomfortable. there were passages i couldn’t help but squirm through: some were COMPLETELY wrong and others were just plain embarrassing.
take this little excerpt for example. i don’t know if it’s because i am around the characters’ ages or something else but reading this made me feel awkward – it read as if the main character was a parent trying too hard to be cool.
“Turk thought he was a real Roadman, and he was lucky in his second name because it fitted that image perfectly. Turk had this dumb haircut which was almost shaved up the sides and long on top. He probably thought it gave him edge. He wore this Adidas pouch on a long strap strung across his body, presumably to hold all his 'drugs’. He also made that really annoying noise with his mouth, that one called kissing your teeth, a sucking little 'street' noise which punctuated everything he said.”
on the island, Link becomes rapidly more and more dislikable whilst his bitter and reprehensible actions start to come through. he makes girls dress up in a skirt and do things for him, punishing them with starvation if they didn’t do what he wanted and that made me sick. he thinks that he’s entitled to do all of this because of how he was bullied in school.
whilst the characters were the most built up out of everything in the whole book, they were very cliched and were your typical high school stereotypes. i feel like the author tried to be quirky with an overused trope but it really didn’t work. as this was a very character-based story, nothing else was as well-developed or explored as i’d hoped. there were so many opportunities that they author could have taken about more aspects of the actual island.
every ‘twist’ in the story could have been seen a mile off so i wasn’t surprised when any of them occurred, which was a shame because i’d heard that there were many twists in STAGS. if they were anything like the twists in the island i doubt i’m going to enjoy the novel.
the epilogue of this book made me lose all hope of this book having any redeeming qualities. it was just so far-fetched and seemingly unlikely that it was very unbelievable.