Morning Everyone,

Happy Saturday and happy weekend. It feels like two minutes since last weekend, the last few days have gone by so quickly. To my delight I’ve managed to get through a lot of reading this week and as we know, that makes me very happy. Hopefully I can indulge in some more this weekend.

Book 📖

Thank you to @SGoodAuthor and @AvonBooksUK for this advanced audio copy of Stranded in return for an honest review. Stranded was published on 16th September 2021 and you can get a copy here.

Description 🔖

Eight strangers arrive on the beautiful yet very remote island of Buidseach for the challenge of a lifetime; to stay and survive on the island unassisted for a whole year. What starts off as the individuals creating friendships and working as a team descends into fractured relationships and the making of enemies.

Everyone is counting down the days until the boat arrives to rescue them, but when the boat doesn’t turn up, things turn even nastier. One of the islanders turns up in a small fishing village desperate to tell her story but she’ll also have to explain why eight people went to the island but only three returned.

General Thoughts 🤔

When I first started this book my initial thoughts were “oh it’s a little bit like Lost”. Then it kind of turned into Hunger Games and then Castaway and I finished it thinking it was like a mish mash of all of them with it’s own unique spin. It was an interesting storyline that did make for thrilling and tense reading at times, however I personally felt like it lacked a little bit of depth. I put this mostly down to the characters rather than the story.

Characters 👭👬👫

When there are eight characters stranded on an island, I would have thought that a lot of the book would have to be about those characters, otherwise the book kind of turns into more of a survival guide than a story. Although there was lots in there about the characters at that present time and their relationships with each other, in order to add some meat to the bones, I felt that I wanted to know more about their backgrounds, where they had come from and how they’d ended up there. I think that this would have allowed me to feel closer to the characters and understand them a little more.

Writing Style ✍️

I enjoyed that the prologue was pretty much the end of the story. This meant that my focus wasn’t so much on how the story would end but more about how it would get there. I liked that a lot. The author has done a great job of pacing this book so that it remains tense and at times a little bit difficult to read (in a good way). When things started to go badly for the main character it was really quite chilling.

Conclusion & Scoring 🎖️

Overall this was a good read with a great plot. On reflection I think my feelings about the characters is quite personal to me and I’m sure that other people don’t feel the same. I thought that Stranded was well written and entertaining and I would recommend this book.

😍😍😍😩😩