Friday, August 7, 2015

The Island Escape by Kerry Fisher

2.5 Star

Can one woman’s marriage survive her best friend’s divorce? Fans of Veronica Henry and Erica James, this is the next book to add to your reading list.

It’s time to get back to where it all began…

Octavia Sheldon thought she’d have a different life. One where she travelled the world with an exotic husband and free-spirited children in tow. But things didn’t turn out quite like that.

Married to safe, reliable Jonathan, her life now consists of packed lunches, school runs and more loads of dirty washing than she ever thought possible. She’s not unhappy. It’s just that she can barely recognise herself any longer.

So as Octavia watches her best friend’s marriage break up, it starts her thinking. What if life could be different? What if she could escape and get back to the person she used to be? Escape back to the island where she spent her summers? And what if the man she used to love was there waiting for her…? 




Kathryn - 2.5 Star


I really enjoyed my last Kerry Fisher read, The School-Gate Survival Guide, so I was interested to see if this next novel would capture my interest as much.  While the writing was just as easy to breeze through I wasn’t as enraptured with the main characters as I had hoped. The novel was split between the narrative of two best friends, Octavia and Roberta. I found their voices both relatable and easy to navigate. The story was fairly simple and the women were also “typical” but I did like their dipping into each other’s lives through the two voices.

The men in the novel didn’t give me as much food for thought as I’d been hoping either- there weren’t any unexpected moments and the ending for Roberta was what I’d predicted from near the beginning. It’s sometimes nice to read something that’s got a happy ending but usually I like to be surprised along the way with the characters or their situations.  It would have been nice to also have the perspective of one of their older children perhaps- this might have made the novel more equitable in terms of ideas and thoughts. Upon reflection the climax of the story happened in the first few chapters and then the rest didn’t live up to the excitement of the outset.

Unfortunately I wasn’t really blown out of the water by The Island Escape like I had been with The School-Gate Survival Guide. It wouldn’t stop me from reading another Kerry Fisher novel but I would hope that the quirky characters I know she can create would be more apparent in the next one.


Thank you to Harper Collins UK for our review copy. All opinions are our own.

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