On the Island by Tracey Garvis Graves

On the Island by Tracey Garvis Graves is a survival story. Anna and TJ are stranded on an island in the Maldives after a plane crash. When nobody comes to the rescue, will they survive? It takes quite a while for the couple (a teenager and his tutor) to realize that nobody is going to save them. Meanwhile, they start out sleeping on the beach, then building a lean-to, and gradually learning to survive with the little food available on the island.

I bought On the Island after reading The Girl He Used to Know and reading reviews of the author's other books. On the Island was a favorite of readers that got a lot of positive reviews and I saved it to read during a time when I was feeling a little slumpish (which has been happening a lot, this past year).

Recommended but not a favorite - I liked the story, in general, because I love survival stories. But, I had problems with a few picky details and happy coincidences. For example, the heroine's suitcase and the hero's backpack conveniently wash up on the beach. That was actually plausible if you consider the fact that they allowed the current to bring them to shore. The same current could have brought their luggage.

However, Anna shoves aside wet clothing to find a treasure trove of products she packed knowing there was no drugstore at their destination. Some of that stuff would have melted away, realistically, if water got into the suitcase. And, when TJ uses her earrings as fish hooks? Well . . . maybe other folks have earrings strong enough to catch a fish but I sure don't.

Not sure I bought into the romance, as well, especially the book's ending. I liked On the Island enough to finish it, although I felt kind of "meh" about it. Maybe it was just the wrong time for me to read it. It's definitely notable that the book has a 4.12/5 rating at Goodreads and the one person who commented when I posted about On the Island at Instagram remembered it as "unputdownable".  She agreed that it had a sagging middle. I would not tell anyone to avoid this book, lest you find my review too negative. I thought it was fun, but some of its plot points just felt a little too convenient.

Other reviews:

The Girl He Used to Know by Tracey Garvis Graves


©2020 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Alpine Ballad by Vasil Bykau

Alpine Ballad by Vasil Bykau is a WWII novel like none I've ever read, before, a story of escape and survival. Near the end of WWII, an Italian girl and a Belarusian soldier escape from a Nazi concentration camp in Austria and run into the surrounding mountains with Germans in pursuit. Both a survival story and a romance, the short novel takes place over a 3-day period.

Ivan has lost his shoes and Giulia is wearing clogs. While his feet become unsurprisingly battered, Giulia's clogs slow her down. Ivan considers abandoning her. His new companion is bizarrely, even dangerously cheerful and he doesn't want her to hold him back or give them away. But, he slowly becomes attached to her as they try to find their way to safety and learn to communicate in a hodge-podge of languages cobbled together. Eventually, they fall in love. But, the Nazis are closing in.

Through flashbacks, we get to know how Ivan has been imprisoned by the Nazis several times and came to be captured, each time. Through dialogue, we learn Giulia's story. And, in a letter entitled "In lieu of an Epilogue," the reader finds out what happened after the war, a finale that will warm you down to your toes.

Highly recommended - Heartbreaking and achingly beautiful, Alpine Ballad is so gripping that I occasionally realized I was holding my breath. It's also an excellent translation. I didn't have any trouble following the story, as I sometimes do with translations, and there are footnotes defining the occasional mixture of non-translated words that are used to show how Ivan and Giulia communicate using a blend of languages. I absolutely loved this book and am going to seek out more of Bykau's writing.


©2019 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

The Last One by Alexandra Oliva

My copy of The Last One doesn't look like the image above, but I ordered a copy from Book Depository (probably the British release) and was unable to find a decent image of it online.

The Last One by Alexandra Oliva has two parallel storylines. The heroine, Zoo, is a contestant in a reality survival series. In her first scene, she's looking for food in a convenience store that's mostly stripped bare. Inside the store, there's a dead body. She thinks it's a prop, not a real dead person. The reader knows, though, that the dead person is real. How did Zoo end up alone and unaware that a deadly illness has ravaged the country? Is anyone alive at all? To find out how events unfolded, the second storyline takes you back to the beginning of the reality series, where you meet the entire cast, the host, the experts, and other people involved in the production of the new survival series.

It's been a few weeks since I read the book but I believe the series begins with 12 contestants. Their tasks are simple, at first, and they work in teams. Each of the contestants is given a nickname of some sort (Zoo is not the heroine's real name) and during the chapters that are written from Zoo's point of view, she refers to them by their real names. Trying to figure out which real name goes with which series nickname is part of the fun; it's a bit like solving a puzzle.

At first, there are rewards for successfully finishing challenges, with the winner receiving the best prizes (generally survival tools, the best place to sleep, or food). Gradually, the number of contestants is narrowed down, teams change, tasks grow more difficult. When they finally reach the point at which they must go it alone, there is no set date for completion and the remaining contestants are told they'll know when it's over. This is part of the reason Zoo continues to believe she's being challenged when the show has long since ended. When she becomes uncertain about where she's supposed to go next, she decides to make home her goal.

Will Zoo make it home? Is she the only survivor of the pandemic that has wiped out people along her route home? What's become of her husband and the other contestants?

Highly recommended, especially to fans of novels about survival - There is one particularly horrifying scene that haunts me, but part of what you get out of The Last One is the sense of what can happen when a person doesn't truly understand what's going on and what kind of pain and regret you can be left with after you realize you've framed your behavior on a certain set of expectations when reality was completely different. I found that the horror gave the book more depth than it would have had if Zoo had not been faced with situations that challenged her morality, as well as her strength and determination.

Also, I really loved the uniqueness. I've never read a book that had a reality show as its setting. From what little I've read about the deceptiveness of reality television -- how far it really falls from "reality" -- I thought the author did a good job of portraying what probably really goes on behind the scenes. And, because you get to know all the contestants from the beginning, you root for them like you would if you were watching it unfold on TV. The difference is that you get to know the real people rather than the characters that are being created through careful editing. At any rate, it's a fun read. Fair warning: there are some gruesome scenes. Occasionally, I found myself skimming a little when the contestants had to gut and prepare their meals.


©2017 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Extreme Food: What to Eat When Your Life Depends On It by Bear Grylls

Extreme Food: What to Eat When Your Life Depends On It by Bear Grylls
Copyright 2014
William Morrow - Nonfiction/Survival
272 pp., incl. index, picture credits and appendices

If you've seen Bear Grylls eating disgusting things on television, you probably have a decent idea what you're in for in Extreme Food but it's far more than worms, birds' eggs and snake meat (although, ugh, I've seen him cook all of those on TV and that egg and worm omelet . . . just, no).

Let me back up a bit. What I expected of Extreme Food was entirely different from what I got. Grylls talks about food, but he also mentions things you should carry in your backpack if you're going out in the woods, how to build a proper fire, how to make a container in which to do your cooking, which plants are best raw or cooked and what he considers the best way to cook them, how to build a number of different traps to catch edible animals, how to best approach an animal you want to hunt, various ways to kill animals and how to make the tools to do so (including a number of different methods of fishing), how to distinguish animal tracks, which animals to avoid entirely and which of the various hunting methods are typically illegal and should only be used if you are in a life or death situation.

That's a surprising amount of information crammed into such a small book. However, there's a down side. The chapter about fungi, for example, describes both edible and poisonous mushrooms. Unfortunately, Grylls says many are so difficult to tell apart that it's best to purchase a more comprehensive guide and study them. Not helpful on the fly. Nor are some of the illustrations all that clear; although, to be fair, some are quite good.

A few things I learned:

• An air rifle is "the only gun you're allowed to carry unlicensed in the UK [. . .] and the same goes for many other parts of the world too." Interesting from an American perspective. 
• The most important single tool you should carry is a good knife.
• There are a lot more ways to fish than I could have ever imagined.
• Death by alligator would seriously suck.
• I'm definitely more of a roots and nuts type of gal than the shoot-and-skin variety but I was much less horrified by the thought of capturing and cooking animals in a desperate situation than I expected.

One thing that hasn't changed:

• I'm still convinced I'll be the first to die if I'm ever in a group of people stranded in the wilderness. And, the others will eat me. But, it doesn't hurt to learn how to try not to die. 

The bottom line:  There's a lot of interesting information in Extreme Food and it's an enjoyable read, if occasionally a bit disgusting. But, it has its downfalls. If you're looking for a single survival manual to keep handy in the event of disaster (to tuck in your automobile trunk or keep handy if you're camping or hiking), this isn't the book I'd choose. I think you'd be better off reading a more comprehensive manual like that put out by the S.A.S. or the U. S. Army. Having said that, I think anyone who has a general interest in survival may come away from the reading having learned something, so I recommend it but it's definitely not my favorite of the survival guides I've read.

My apologies to anyone on my feed who has seen three versions of this post. I made a mistake in the first version, updated it, and then decided I needed to add a few more thoughts.

©2015 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Lost in Shangri-La by Michael Zuckoff

Lost in Shangri-La by Michael Zuckoff: The Epic True Story of a Plane Crash into the Stone Age

Copyright 2011

Harper - Nonfiction/History/WWII

370 pages, incl. notes, sources and bibliography

Summary:

Near the end of WWII, a group of nurses and soldiers stationed on what was then known as Dutch New Guinea left for a sightseeing flight over the interior of the island. Dubbed "Shangri-La," the island's interior was inhabited by natives whose daily lives involved almost continuous battles between their tribes. Because of the rugged terrain around them, the natives were extremely isolated and unacquainted with people of other skin colors or traditions. They were also superstitious and sometimes cannibalistic.

A series of small mistakes on the flight into the dangerous interior led to a horrendous crash of the plane, the Gremlin Special, into the side of a mountain. In spite of the tremendous wreckage and resulting fire, 3 of the plane's 24 crew and passengers managed to escape. But, they emerged injured and lost high on a mountain in a land where people still lived Stone-Age lifestyles and Japanese soldiers hid in the hills.

What happened to the survivors? Given the terrain and the fact that the enemy watched from the hillsides, how would rescuers find them and bring the injured survivors to safety? Would the rescuers even survive their perilous journey into the island's interior?

What I disliked about Lost in Shangri-La:

Lost in Shangri-La wasn't quite what I expected, but that may be my own fault. When I see "WWII" and "plane crash" or "survival" together, I'm interested. I was expecting to read about soldiers who crashed into the jungle, not a sight-seeing plane. It's possible that I merely skimmed the promotional material. The real-life characters were not quite what I expected, in other words, but that didn't really matter.

I did, however, dislike what the author had to say about the one surviving female. She was beautiful and she knew it. One of her fellow survivors was a man she had turned down when he asked her out on a date. She had to be tough and adventurous to have even ended up in a place like Dutch New Guinea, but I thought the emphasis on her beauty went a little overboard.

What I liked about Lost in Shangri-La:

Irritation about the focus on the beautiful Margaret Hastings aside, I think the book was marvelously, thoroughly researched and fascinating. The author delves into culture -- the differences between the natives of the island's interior and the people who have explored or crashed inside their isolated home, the beliefs and traditions of the natives. He also describes the details of the crash and how the survivors managed to stay alive, the variety of plans floated to rescue them and the eventual decision and outcome.

The bottom line:

While I would not say Lost in Shangri-La is the most exciting survival book I've ever read, nor a favorite, I enjoyed the reading and would say it's above average as far as the research and detail. I thought the author focused a little too much on the negative characteristics of many of the people involved in all aspects -- flight, survival, rescue. But, I found myself truly admiring the fortitude of the survivors. It's not the heart-pounding kind of rescue/survival story I like best, so Lost in Shangri-La is not a personal favorite, but I think it's well-written.

©2011 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery and Babble or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.