5 Star
A group of friends.
A yacht.
And a disappearance-at-sea that turns paradise into a chilling nightmare.
Lana and her best friend Kitty leave home looking for freedom—and that’s exactly what they find when they are invited onto The Blue, a fifty-foot yacht making its way from the Philippines to New Zealand. The crew is made up of a group of young travellers bitten by wanderlust, and it doesn’t take long for Lana and Kitty’s dream of sea-bound romance to turn into reality.
Both women fall under the hypnotic spell of The Blue, spending their days exploring remote islands and their rum-filled nights relaxing on deck beneath the stars. But when one of their friends disappears overboard after an argument with another crewmember, the dark secrets that brought each of them aboard start to unravel.
Kathryn - 5 Star
I gobbled this book up in 24 hours. It was fantastic. I knew that Lucy Clarke was a great writer as my fellow reviewers had really enjoyed her other novels so I selfishly grabbed this one for myself and I’m thrilled that I did.
There is something of The Beach by Alex Garland about the novel- something hazy, with travellers in unbelievable places and situations, but the story is based on a yacht “The Blue” and doesn’t drift into the drug induced fog as much as The Beach. For me though, there were definite similarities in the emotions invoked by the travellers and characters involved. They are all escaping something or trying to forget about something. That need to be apart from reality is a common thread for the characters in both novels.
Too many times I wanted to skip ahead and find out what was going to come clear in the next section and had to force myself to go back and read every word. I didn’t want to miss any clues or hints or some relationship detail that would be key later. The thing about this book is that the relationships are just as important as the mystery and action part. Lucy Clarke is a great story-teller and I absolutely cannot say anything about the plot for fear of giving anything away. Suffice it to say that the story is intriguing and I was thrown even to the end of the epilogue but the connections between the people on board are tangible and the inter-relationships perfectly played out while maintaining the feelings of the idyllic surroundings.
A great read!
Thank you to Simon & Schuster Canada for our review copy. All opinions are our own.
Connect with Lucy Clarke:
No comments:
Post a Comment