The Light Between Oceans

There was only about one thing I like about this book and that was the way they described the surroundings. The locations seemed beautiful and were described so well I could almost feel like I was there.

However, the rest of the book I absolutely hated. I don't know where to start. Isabelle was a horrible person. I couldn't sympathize with her. I don't think it's because I had never had a child or miscarriages but because she was clearly mentally ill. At first, I was like okay, they decided to just keep the child for a day to take care of her, okay no problem. Then I knew that she would manipulate him into keeping her. This made me sad because it was such a cop out. Emotional manipulative woman convinces her doormat of a husband to keep someone else's child even though he KNOWS that's the wrong thing to do.

When Tom started writing the notes to Hannah I actually thought that maybe it was Isabelle and that the reader was throwing us off. I thought, wow that's going to be a twist! NOPE. Just Tom and his guilty conscience, because I should have realized that when it comes to children, women would do anything to keep them safe blah blah blah. That was the reasoning that Isabelle gave. She stated that she did not want the child to go to an orphanage as her main reason. If that was the main reason, then once they find out that Hannah is alive, they should just explain everything. They would have been much less hated had that happened.

I did feel sorry for Hannah. Clearly she got dealt the worst hand. She not only got disowned by her father for marrying a German man, but she subsequently lost both her husband and her baby at the same time putting her into a what I can only describe as a catatonic state. So of course when she gets the first note everyone just thinks she is insane. I can't imagine how helpless she must have been feeling.

Back to Isabelle. Wow, what a horrible human being. The excuses can keep getting stated (her miscarriages, being lonely on the island) but I will still not feel sorry for her. She seemed to have NO remorse until the end, where it was almost too late to help Tom, and then she went in to tell the truth, but just before that she still lies to Hannah to get the child back. When she has a stillbirth she blames in on Tom, and at no point in time does she apologize for that. She also completely freaks out when she thinks that he got a doctor to come to the island to take a look at her. HOW DARE HE? HOW DARE HER LOVING HUSBAND WANT TO TAKE CARE OF HER? I know that in the end she does “the right thing” but that does not erase all the wrong she had done. I would say poor Tom, and sure he also had a crappy situation but clearly he did not do anything to get out of it. He himself could have just sent out for a boat to take the baby back on the second day but he loved his wife too much to take this child away from her.

I feel like there was way too much back story on Hannah's father. I understand that it was added so that he could relate to Lucy but in the end it did not need to be that long and detailed. I found it interesting but then at the end of the book I found myself wondering why that whole chuck was dedicated to him just to bring it back up that one time.

All in all, I loved the description of the scenery but I did not like any of the characters. I could not sympathize with any of them and found them all to be very boring.

I apologized profusely to my book club for picking this book and I don't doubt that this is the worst book they have read all year.